"To the pray we, as Prince incomparable The soull of this lorde from all daunger of hell, Where thou art Lord and God omnipotent. "O quene of mercy, O lady full of grace, To pardon thy servaunt, and brynge to salvacion. "In joy triumphaunt the hevenly yerarchy, With all the hole sorte of that glorious place, The Father, the Sonn, and the Holy Ghost Besides these, there is the curious "Boke of Philipp Sparowe," written in the first years of the sixteenth century, on the death of a sparrow, belonging to Jane Scroupe, who was being educated in Carrow Nunnery near Norwich. There is, of course, an imitation of Catullus, but there is much besides. The poem is some 1300 lines long, and I can only give a short passage here. Jane Scroupe is speaking: "Was never bird in cage In doing his homage Death hath departed us twain The poem naturally wants the seriousness of elegy, which only the melancholy of a highly civilised age enabled Catullus and Matthew Arnold to give to the death of an animal, and even if the matter were more serious, this ambling metre would prevent it from making any adequate impression. Skelton has a touch of Rabelais or Marot about him, and it is not from such men that we look for elegy. The grave beauty of the lament for Lord Northumberland belongs, it should be noted, to his early life, and does not reappear. In passing from the tutor of Henry VIII's childhood to the poet who was one of the ornaments and one of the victims of the close of his reign, we definitely pass from the atmosphere of the Middle Ages to that of the Renaissance. Skelton has a little of each about him. The satirist of clerical abuses, and the scholar, whom Erasmus could call "Britannicarum literarum lumen et decus," belong to the new order of things. The total want of order and method, and of any conception of the architecture of literary work, the habit of thinking that anything that occurs to him is worth saying, and that any place in any poem will suit it very well, all this, on the other hand, points back to the incoherence of the Middle Age. When we open Surrey, we feel at once that we have passed out of barbarism. There is something adult and almost modern in the new propriety of language, in the comparative reasonableness of the outlook upon life and the world. The hundred years which elapsed between Surrey's death and that of Charles I. form the most brilliant century in our literary history, and elegy, with which we are concerned here, fills its full place in it. Naturally Spenser, who is so much the greatest poetic figure of the period, if we leave the drama out of account, occupies the first place also in elegy. "Astrophel," "Daph naida," "The Ruins of Time," constitute an imposing mass of elegiac work which has few parallels. Two of them relate to the death, which called forth more and finer poetic lamentation than that of any Englishman before or since, for the "Ruins of Time" is, in fact, an additional elegy on Sidney, occasioned, perhaps, by the consciousness in Spenser himself, or in others, of the inadequacy of "Astrophel" to express a love and sorrow so great when felt by so great a poet. Among other poets who joined Spenser in attempting to express the universal grief at what then seemed, and perhaps was the most tragic event of Elizabeth's reign, were Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, Henry Constable, Thomas Watson, and Sir Walter Raleigh. Two of these elegies, with others, were published in the collection of which Spenser's "Astrophel" was the principal poem. One may observe in nearly all these pieces, that elegy in poets of the Renaissance no longer strikes quite the same note as was The old feeling aroused of helplessness before the struck by the medieval elegy. by death was, as it were, that inevitable; death is only one more dark incident, the final one, in a dark and difficult world. But these brave Renaissance spirits, who walked life's journey so erect and joyous and defiant, intent on seeing, knowing, enjoying, daring, everything that life might put in their way to see or know or dare or enjoy, could not content themselves, when they saw a life of noble promise cut short in its prime, with the reflection that death was universal and inevitable. They were impatient and indignant at the apparent loss and waste that death involves. If what the men of the Middle Ages felt about death amounted to little more than a cold consciousness that it is the common lot, if our feeling about it to-day is principally one of wonder at its mystery, it is neither its mystery nor its universality that chiefly filled the minds of the men of the Renaissance; what struck them above all things was its cruelty. That is the note we catch again and again in their elegies, and not least in those that followed Sidney's death. A generation later, when the stars in our poetic constellation had become more numerous, another death occurred, about which there was much of the same feeling of bright hopes disappointed, and which produced a still greater body of elegiac poetry. But few arts are rarer than that of making the poetic plant flourish in courtly soil, and though Chapman, Donne, Drummond, Wither, William Browne, and Thomas Campion were among the many poets who expressed the grief they sincerely felt for the young Prince of Wales, who had d shown himself a true patron of letters, their efforts produced nothing that can be described as great or important poetry. Chapman's роет, which contains more than six hundred lines, and is almost a maze of confusion and obscurity, has some fine passages here and there. In one he laments that "One that in hope took up to topless height should die so young that he can have accomplished nothing solid, worthy of our souls! On this occasion Henry Peacham published a book of his poems, containing a series of laments for the Prince, and, indeed, the custom of publishing a number of elegies, by one or many authors, of which Spenser's "Astrophel" was the first example, had now grown not uncommon. The death of Ben Jonson in 1637, which was, perhaps, regarded as a greater loss by men of letters than that of any other English poet has ever been, was at once followed by the publication of the volume called "Jonsonus Virbius," which consists of tributes to his memory contributed by authors, among whom are to be found the names of Falkland, who opens it with a graceful pastoral elegy, Cleveland, whose charming little poem will be |