only a series of episodes which provide an opportunity for rural descriptions or personal reflections; and as the human actors in the poem are associated with heathen deities and allegorical abstractions, the reader is in no way moved by the changes in their fortune. As with Spenser's Faery Queen, the poem is harmonised by the sense of beauty in the poet, who succeeds in blending his strangely assorted materials in an ideal atmosphere emanating from his own mind. Browne's style, as befitting the unreality of his subject, is characterised by a kind of romantic Euphuism, which makes Britannia's Pastorals resemble in verse what the Arcadia is in prose. The vocabulary contains, like the Faery Queen, many archaic words: the metre imitates the use of the heroic couplet by Sylvester, translator of Du Bartas' Weeks of Creation, with whose enthusiastic love of the country Browne was in deep sympathy: the diction and versification unite to form a style of conscious naïveté which, in its easy flow, suggests the placid movement of a brook, gliding noiselessly under pollarded willows, and irrigating the level meadows through which it passes. Browne was one of those poets who mature early, and whose art lies within a narrow compass. The first two books of Britannia's Pastorals were written before he was twenty.' Besides that poem, The Shepherd's Pipe, Lydford Journey, and the Two Elegies on Henry, Prince of Wales, nothing of his work was published in his lifetime. The MS. of the third book of the Pastorals and of a few other poems was discovered in the library of Salisbury Cathedral by the late Beriah Botfield, and was printed for the Percy Society in 1852. The Inner Temple Masque, preserved in a MS. of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1 O how (methinks) the imps of Mneme bring Which not twice ten suns have bestowed on me, In nonaged youth as in the length of years. Book i. song v. 50. Library, was printed in 1772, and other poems of Browne have been collected from the Lansdowne MSS. in the British Museum, and from a MS. in the library of Trinity College, Dublin. But in none of these is there any advance on the charming freshness and the fine workmanship of the first two books of Britannia's Pastorals. Even in The Shepherd's Pipe, which appeared in 1614, there is a comparative lack of invention: no note is struck in the series of eclogues that had not already been heard in the poems of Spenser, Breton, Barnfield, and Drayton.1 What, however, is observable in all Browne's work is the delicate Euphuism which amid the confusion of elements in the Pastorals-rural images, antiquarian learning, and personal allusion-furnishes the leaven of the style. Sometimes his excessive bias towards Euphuism carries him beyond the proper mark, as in the second stanza of the fine epitaph, so often erroneously ascribed to Ben Jonson :— Underneath this sable hearse Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother; Marble piles let no man raise Shall turn marble, and become Both her mourner and her tomb.. On the other hand, there is complete propriety in the charmingly Euphuistic description of Oberon's banquet, in the unpublished third book of the Pastorals, which, as it was probably written about 1625,2 was doubtless read 1 In this poem Wither claims to have had a hand. See his Fides Anglicana. 2 Commendatory verses written in praise of Browne's Pastorals were found by Crofton Croker inscribed in a copy of that poem printed in 1625. As they are all by members of Exeter College, they probably were collected, in view of the continuation of the Pastorals, at the time when Browne had returned to Exeter as tutor of Robert Dormer. in MS. by Herrick, and furnished him with the suggestion for his beautiful series of fairy fantasies. In the same way, I imagine, Sir John Suckling drew the inspiration of his well-known Ballad at a Wedding from the lively movement of Browne's Lydford Journey, which appeared in print as early as 1630. CHAPTER IV SPENSER'S SUCCESSORS BEGINNINGS Of Didactic, EPIGRAMMATIC, AND SATIRIC POETRY: SIR JOHN DAVIES: JOSEPH HALL: JOHN MARSTON It is unnecessary to insist upon the fact that the germs of didactic poetry are contained in the religious system of the Middle Ages. The course of this History has shown that when the Church ceased to be alarmed at the fascinations of literary art and fiction, she sought to turn them to her own purposes. She originated the Miracle Play. She metamorphosed the secular tales of the Gesta Romanorum into sacred allegories. Allegory became in her hands the great instrument for the interpretation of Nature. We have seen how Dante declares that theology condescends by means of sensible images to reveal to the human understanding the highest spiritual truths; how the Church explains to Langland the meaning of the vision of the field full of folk; and how Spenser makes use of her ancient methods for the glorification of his sovereign in the "dark allegorie" of the Faery Queen, or veils his covert satire on the Court under the discourses of his animals in Mother Hubberd's Tale. When the scholastic system of the Church began to be undermined by the Renaissance, allegory necessarily ceased to be an effective instrument for the interpretation of Nature. But the didactic impulse in poetry was as strong as ever, and the poets, seeking new vehicles of expression for their changed ideas of Nature and society, found models convenient for their purpose in the elegant imitations of Virgil's or Horace's didactic manner, produced by such late Latin verse-writers as Pontanus, author of Urania, Fracastoro, author of De Morbo Gallico, and Vida, author of the Ludus Scacchia and the Ars Poetica. The first to introduce the classic style into the Court of Elizabeth was John Davies, author of Nosce Teipsum, who, though he was the earliest, remains in many respects the finest didactic poet in the English language. The third son of John Davies, a gentleman of Wiltshire, he was born at Tisbury, in that county, in 1569, and was educated first at Winchester, afterwards either at New College or (according to other authorities) Queen's College, Oxford. In 1587 he was admitted as a member of the Society of the Middle Temple, and in 1590 took his B.A. degree at Oxford. His first published poem, Orchestra, was licensed for printing as early as 1593, but no edition is found earlier than 1596. It was dedicated in a laudatory sonnet to his friend, Richard Martin, a member of the same Inn; but in 1597 the latter must have given Davies deep offence, for the poet struck him publicly in the Middle Temple Hall, while seated at dinner. In consequence of this breach of discipline and good manners, Davies was disbarred, and returned for a while to Oxford, where he occupied himself with the composition of his famous poem, Nosce Teipsum. He himself records the spirit in which his work was conceived and written : If ought can teach us ought, Affliction's looks This mistress lately plucked me by the ear, She within lists my ranging mind hath brought, |