No More Learning

He describes
the duties of all the officers of the ship, as well as her timbers and
sails, and adds many quaint illustrations of the use of sea terms,
and the manner of working the ship and giving battle.
Right your helme a loufe, keepe your loufe, come no neere, keepe full,
stidy, so you goe well, port, warre, no more; beare up the helme, goe roumy,
beyare at the helme, a fresh man at the helme. . . . Boy fetch my celler of
bottles, a health to you all fore and afte, courage my hearts for a fresh
charge; Maister lay him a bord loufe for loufe; Midships men see the tops
and yeards well maned with stones and brasse bals, to enter them in the
shrouds, and every squadron else at the best advantage; sound Drums and
Trumpets, and St. George for England.
Smith goes on to describe the ordnance of the ship, with reference
to gunnery treatises, saying, “any of these will give you the
Theorike; but to be a good Gunner, you must learne it by
practise. ' The excellence of his maxims caused a demand for his
book: enlarged editions of the Accidence appeared under the
title The Sea-Man's Grammar; containing most plain and
easie directions how to Build, Rigge, Yard and Mast any Ship
whatever, and it was still being republished in 1691.
Smith represented both the scientific and practical sides of his
profession; but a conflict was growing up between theory and
practice which was not without influence on the literature of the
sea at this time. The new-born science of the sea was inclined to
despise the rough methods, and, perhaps, the rude manners, of the
men who had attained their objects and had fought tempests and
the dangers of rocks and lee shores in gales, with only the know-
ledge born of hard experience; while those of the older school
regarded with contempt the new-fangled theories and scientific
appliances of the modern seaman, which they did not understand,
and his love for comforts which some of them scorned.
We find the literary expression of this controversy in two
volumes, which are almost, if not quite, the earliest separately
published English narratives of voyages in search of a north-west
passage. These are The Strange and Dangerous Voyage of
Captain Thomas James in his Intended Discovery of the North-


## p. 106 (#128) ############################################

106
Seafaring and Travel
West Passage into the South Sea (1633), and the whimsically
named North-West Fox; or Fox from the North-West Passage,
of captain Luke Fox of Hull (1635). These explorers were both
engaged in their work in 1631, and met in the icy regions, their
work, apparently, being inspired by the healthful rivalry of the
Bristol and London merchants. James, who was furnished with
a ship by the merchants of Bristol, and is said to have belonged to
a good family, was a man of education, and a scientific seaman,
who, while knowing the importance of setting sail in a well-found
vessel with a trained company, was sensible of the necessity of a
proper knowledge of navigation, and of being supplied with proper
instruments. Accordingly, before putting to sea, he endeavoured
to extend his former studies by obtaining journals, plots (or charts),
descriptions, or whatever would assist him, and set skilful crafts-
men to make quadrants, staves, semicircles and compass-needles.
The narrative of his voyage is very interesting as a picture of
the life of the explorer in those times, and of professional
seamen at work. Fox, on the other hand, belonged to the old
school. He had spent his whole life in the practical business of
the sea
6
'Gentle Reader,' he says, “expect not heere florishing Phrases or Eloquent
tearmes; for this child of mine, begot in the North-West's cold Clime (where
they breed no Schollers), is not able to digest the sweet milke of Rhethorick,
that's food for them. '
He goes on to deride the 'mathematicall sea-man,' who, he avers,
would fail in contest with the 'ruffe and boisterous ocean. ' He
proceeds:
Being deprived of sun, moon and stars for long season, they will then
think that they only dreamed before; when they imagined of the course of
the seas, and that their books were but weak schoolmasters; that the talk of
art were far short of the practice, when, at beholding the stars, which they
thought to have used as guides and directions, seem now as they threatened
their ruin and destruction; nay, when they shall look forth and tremble at
the rising of every wave, and shall be aghast with fear to refrain those rocks
and dangers which lie hid within the sea's fairest bosom, together with the
greatness of the ocean, and smallness of their ship; for want of experience to
handle, not knowing how to shun, they will then think that the least gale is
of force to overthrow them, and know that art must be taught to practice by
long and industrious use. For it is not enough to be a seaman, but it is
necessary to be a painful seaman; for a seabred man of reasonable capacity
may attain to so much art as may serve to circle the earth's globe about; but
the other, wanting the experimental part, cannot; for I do not allow any to
be a good seaman that hath not undergone the most offices about a ship, and
that hath not in his youth been both taughớ and inured to all labours; for to
keep a warm cabin and lie in sheets is the most ignoble part of a seaman; but
to endure and suffer, as a hard cabin, cold and salt meat, broken sleeps,


## p. 107 (#129) ############################################

Theory and Practice
107
mouldy bread, dead beer, wet clothes, want of fire, all these are within board ;
besides boat, lead, top-yarder, anchor-moorings and the like.
But Fox was not so insensible of the value of written experience
as his words might imply, for he, like Eden, Hakluyt and Purchas,
was a collector of voyages, and he deserves an honourable place
here because his volume includes an account of expeditions from
early times down to Baffin and some later discoverers. The
narratives of James and Fox have been reprinted in a single
volume by the Hakluyt society. They did not explore beyond the
bay which takes its name, to use Purchas's expression, from that
worthy irrecoverable discoverer,' Hudson.
The controversy of those times has had its echoes in later days.
Fox was a representative seaman of an old school, but he and
those who thought with him could not stay the advance of science
into the seaman's domain. A truer understanding of the relative
positions of theory and practice presently arose, and a considerable
literature indicated the advances that were being made in the sea-
man's art. Sir Henry Manwayring, who was captain of the Unicorn
in the Ship Money fleet of 1636, was an officer who helped
to spread a knowledge of the practical things that concerned the
sea profession, and he did so for the assistance of the gentlemen
captains of the time, which was one of naval decay-the fleet of
Charles I being greatly disorganised, ineptly commanded and
much demoralised and mutinous. Manwayring's The Sea-Man's
Dictionary, or an Exposition and Demonstration of all the
parts and things belonging to a ship, was first published in
1644, a second edition appearing after the Restoration in 1670.
The author's object was to instruct those gentlemen who, though
they be called seamen,' did not fully understand what belongs to
their profession,' and to give them some knowledge of the names
of parts of ships and the manner of doing things at sea. The
information was intended to instruct those whose quality, attend-
ance, indisposition of body, or the like' prevented them from
gaining a proper knowledge of these things. The significance,
therefore, of Manwayring's book is that it throws a side-light
upon the well-known shortcomings of some of the cavalier
officers. The form of the book is alphabetical, in the manner of
a glossary or dictionary.
The last writer we need mention in illustrating this aspect of
the literature of the sea is captain Nathaniel Boteler, an officer of
whom very little is known, but who was evidently an experienced
student of his profession, and who had considerable knowledge of
6


## p. 108 (#130) ############################################

108
Seafaring and Travel
the internal economy of ships of war. His work, Six Dialogues
about Sea Services between an High Admiral and a Captain at
Sea, was published in 1685, but had evidently been written some
years earlier. It deals with the commander-in-chief, officers and
men, victualling, the names of the several parts of a ship, the choice
of the best ships and the signals, sailing, chasing and fighting of
ships of war. The admiral and the captain discourse on these
and many related questions, such as punishments, sometimes
by way of catechism, but, generally, by instructive comment
and criticism. Boteler was a writer with a sense of humour,
and some of his remarks are very incisive and instructive. He
had a very exalted idea of the position and duties of a captain,
and says that his charge was as high as that of any colonel on
land, ‘and for the point of honour, what greater honour hath
our nation in martial matters than in his Majesty's Navy? '
He would have the lieutenant admonished that he be not too
fierce in his way at first (which is an humour whereto young men
are much addicted), but to carry himself with moderation. So
does Boteler discourse upon the character and duties of the purser,
the boatswain and the other 'standing officers,' as also upon the
men, for whom he had a good deal of sympathy, while never over-
looking the necessities of discipline. Taken as a whole, Boteler's
Dialogues is one of the most interesting volumes dealing with the
sea service that appeared within the century.
If the subject treated in these chapters be pursued in regard to
later times, it will be found to embrace many new features and, in
some respects, to have a less specialised character. Records of
travel begin to take the place of narratives of discovery, and the lite-
rature of the sea and of land journeys widens into channels of many
varied interests. The literature of piracy occupies a position of
its own, to which reference will be made later when the writings
of Defoe are under consideration. The growing volume of the
literature of the sea has many ramifications, and it includes purely
technical treatises, historical narratives, controversial pamphlets,
theatrical productions, broadsheets of song and many other things
indicative of the channels through which the national interest in
the sea and national love for the sea service manifest themselves.


## p. 109 (#131) ############################################

CHAPTER VI
THE SONG-BOOKS AND MISCELLANIES
In an earlier chapter of this work? was described the revival
of English poetry under the influence of Italy and France, and
the progress of the school of Wyatt and Surrey to its decay.
The impulse was worn out; the chivalric ideal had ceased to be
a genuine source of inspiration, and there was need of new ideals,
new blood and new literary methods. We have now to consider
the later and more national poetry which the labours of Sidney
and Spenser called into being.
It is impossible, of course, to name a date as that at which
new methods were employed and new themes sung. Before the
school of Wyatt and Surrey had fallen into decay, the Elizabethan
outburst of song had begun, and the writers to be considered in
this chapter will be found to cover a period of nearly thirty years,
during which the full chorus sang from sunrise to high noon.
If this was a period, to a great extent, of poets by profession,
it was, also, to a degree never since equalled, a period when every
man was a poet not only in spirit but in practice. The accomplish-
ment which had belonged to a few courtiers in the days of
Henry VIII had spread to every man of education ; every one
with an emotion to express may be said to have expressed it
naturally in poetry. And some of the sweetest lyrics in Elizabethan
poetry were the work of men whose very names are to this day
unknown. They were passed round in manuscript, to be read
aloud or sung to the lute and viol in private houses, and have
survived in manuscript collections, in the song-books of the day, or,
occasionally, in printed miscellanies. When a song was popular,
it was repeated in various publications ; take, as an instance, the
dialogue, possibly written by Sir Walter Ralegh, between Meliboeus
and Faustus, beginning 'Shepherd, what's Love, I pray thee tell ? '
which appears in The Phoenix Nest (1593), England's Helicon
(1600) and Davison's Poetical Rapsody (1602) and is set to music
in Robert Jones's Second Book of Songs and Airs (1601).
1 See vol. 111, chap. VIII.


## p. 110 (#132) ############################################

IIO
The Song-books and Miscellanies
The poetry now to be considered falls, in the main, into two
divisions : there is the lyric of pure joy or grief, and there is
the longer, graver, reflective lyric, revealing an attitude towards
life which is, perhaps, more characteristically English. Poetry
of the former kind is rarer in our language than poetry of
the latter, and it is found at its best in the compositions of
the days of Elizabeth. For its forms—the pastoral, the sonnet,
the canzone and the madrigal—it is still dependent, no doubt,
as was the poetry of Wyatt and Surrey, on foreign models ;
but the models have now been perfectly assimilated. The voice
is pure English, and English of its day. The machinery of the
Middle Ages-courts of love, allegorical visions and so forth—has
passed out of use, and the feeling of the present moment is
naturally, simply and sweetly expressed. It would, perhaps, be
truer to say that the voice is not so much English as universal.
There is so much in it of the paganism which is of the essence of
the natural man that it can dispense with the particular. There
is practically no reference to events or tendencies of the time.
There is no sense of responsibility, no afterthought. To watch
its growth is like watching primroses break into bloom, or like
listening to the chorus of birds growing fuller in the woods as the
dawn grows towards morning; so spontaneous, so much the effect
of purely natural causes, does this poetry appear. The imagery,
where imagery is employed, is almost always pastoral. We have
seen a very early pastoral in Tottel s Miscellany, and have noticed
in Googe the use of pastoral in the conventional classical manner.
In the lyrists of the latter age its use is quite unconventional, and
brings with it no sense of artificiality. “Shepherd,' as we read,
means 'man,' and shepherdess' mere ‘woman’; the use of these
words and the talk about flocks, pipes and so forth, do nothing
to cloak the sincerity of the outburst of feeling.
The mass of this poetry that has survived remains still un-
measured, though the labours of Arber, Bullen and others have
done something to explore and map the large and intricate field.
These poems, it must be noticed, were copied again and again for
the purpose of singing. The practice of solo and part singing was
more general in Elizabeth's days than in our own. "There is not
any music of instruments whatsoever,' wrote William Byrd, 'com-
parable to that which is made of the voices of men. The lute,
the viol and the virginals' were in every household for accom-
1 For the musical instruments of the period see Grove's Dictionary of Music, and
Furnivall's Laneham's Letters (1908), pp. 65–68.


## p. 111 (#133) ############################################

Music and Poetry
III
paniment, as a piano is to-day, and were put to a better use; and
there can be no doubt that music had a great influence on the
quantity, and no small influence on the quality, of the lyric poetry
which was being produced with no thought, in many cases, beyond
that of putting the song (as we saw in the case of The Handefull
of pleasant delites) to a tune already known or of having it set
to a new one.
'Poetry makes melody, not melody poetry,' wrote Richard
Garnett, and he implied that the only thing music can do for
poetry is to increase the quantity of it. Certainly, in our own
day, we have a terrible example of the amount of 'poetry' which
a
'music' can produce; and, in the days of Elizabeth, music was
equally fruitful in this way. But a wide difference must be noted.
To-day, feeble and slipshod music produces still more feeble and
washy poetry ; in those days, music that was still in the very
salutary 'bondage' of a pretty severe formalism cooperated with
a lyric poetry of natural and sincere sweetness to produce perfect
song.
Elizabethan composers for the voice made use of two distinct
styles: the madrigal and the ayre. Of these, the madrigal was
a piece of continuous music, not broken into stanzas, but woven
from start to finish without break and without repetition. Further,
it was written in the 'polyphonic' style, in which four, five or six
voices sang, at the same time, independent melodies, which had no
necessary likeness in pitch or in rhythm. Different words were
often sung simultaneously, or the same words to different rhythms,
80 that if each singer was made to accent his words with the
greatest care, the impression on the hearer was general. This
accounts, to some extent, for the brevity, directness and simplicity
of the madrigal form of poem. The ayre, on the other hand, was
composed stanza by stanza, often repeating the same music to
different stanzas. The musical idea, whether the ayre were
composed for one or for several voices, was generally a single
idea, and the parts were made to conform more or less to a
single rhythm, which corresponded to the metre of the verse.
Writers of ayres, who threw their words into prominence and kept
the stanzas entire, necessarily had a much greater effect upon the
lyric than madrigalists, especially those who wrote for a single
voice with instrumental (usually lute) accompaniment'.
It is impossible to determine the shares accurately. The best
i Thanks are due to H. C. Colles for much assistance in the passages in this
chapter relating to Elizabethan music.


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II2 The Song-books and Miscellanies
1
1
lyric poetry of the age 'sings itself': it suggests its own tune
irresistibly, and is, in a sense, complete without the written
music; and there can be no doubt that the demands of increasing
variety and range in poetry spurred music on to greater freedom
in the effort to cope with it. On the other hand, the freest music
of the day was more rigid and more formal than the strictest
poetry; and it would not be rash to state that music directly
affected the quality of the poetry in two ways: first, by putting a
check on all temptation to neglect conciseness of expression and
strictness of form; and, secondly, by keeping it simple and
sensuous, as lyric poetry should be. The standing danger to
which music exposes poetry—that the rhythm of the poetry may
be sacrificed to that of the music-is very rarely incurred in the
Elizabethan ayres. Those who have had the privilege of reading
the book of words of a modern musical comedy will know how the
"lyrics' are, of themselves, for the most part, absolutely shapeless
and rhythmless. They only take shape when it is supplied by the
rhythm or melody of the music; and this is rarely the case. An
Elizabethan poet-amateur or professional-writing a lyric to
music of his own or another's had a different task. The tune was,
in itself, a little rigid in shape ; his lyric could not, therefore, be
shapeless. And, conversely, a composer putting a tune to a lyric
had before him something with a structure of its own which he
could not help respecting. In this connection, Thomas Campion,
whose work, as a whole, is considered elsewhere in this volume, is a
composer of especial interest. He wrote his words in order to set
them himself; his ayres are melodies extending over a single stanza,
and the contour of each melody is carefully devised, both in pitch
and rhythm, to express the sense, throwing the important words
into relief. He takes care, therefore, to bring the important words
in each stanza into the same position in the line; and, as in Burns,
each stanza corresponds not only in metrical rhythm, but in inner
sense-rhythm, to all the rest. At the opposite extreme, as com-
posers have found, stands Tennyson, who can only be set to music
on the durch-componirt principle. And, as time went on, not
only did the composer come to respect the structure of the lyric
more and more, but it became more possible for him to respect it
as the lyric became more perfectly shaped.
The earliest and most famous of composers of music for songs
and part songs (for Thomas Whythorne, who published sets in 1571
and 1590, need not be considered) was William Byrd, composer
of the famous masses, and 'one of the gentlemen of the Queen's


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Musical Composers
I13
Majesty's honorable Chapel. ' He published three song-books,
and contributed to several others. Nicholas Yonge did good
service in circulating Italian madrigals in the two parts of
Musica Transalpina (1588 and 1597). Next came John Dowland,
a great traveller, who, at one time, was lutanist to the king of
Denmark. Dowland, who is celebrated by Richard Barnfield in
the sonnet sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare, 'If Musique and
Sweet Poetrie agree,' made a distinct advance beyond Byrd in
consulting the form of the poem when setting it to music: witness
his setting of the poem, probably by Peele, ‘His golden locks
time hath to silver turned, which was spoken before Elizabeth by
Sir Henry Lee, when he resigned the office of champion in 1590,
and is quoted by Thackeray in The Newcomes. By 1612, how-
ever, when Dowland published his last collection, A Pilgrim's
Solace, we learn from his letter to the reader that the old musician
was already considered as composing “after the old manner. '
Other composers and collectors of music who fall within our
period are Thomas Morley, John Mundy, Thomas Campion, Philip
Rosseter, William Barley, Thomas Weelkes, George Kirbye, Gyles
Farnaby, John Wilbye, John Farmer, Robert Jones and Richard
Carlton ; while Thomas Ravenscroft, Michael Este, Thomas
Greaves, Thomas Bateson, Frances Pilkington, captain Tobias
Hume, John Coperario, John Bartlet, John Danyel, Richard
Alison, Thomas Ford, Alphonso Ferrabosco, William Corkine,
Robert Dowland, Orlando Gibbons and others carried on the
work well into Jacobean times. Of these, Byrd, Weelkes, Kirbye,
Wilbye, Este, Bateson and Gibbons wrote in the madrigal or
polyphonic form, while Dowland, Morley, Campion, Jones and
Ravenscroft were chiefly writers of ayres for one or more voices.
The song-books of all these and other collections in print and
manuscript have been searched by Bullen, whose editions of Eliza-
bethan lyrics brought to light long unsuspected treasures.
To examine the whole list would take too long. William Byrd,
who composed before the type of poem written for the madrigal had
become popular in England, drew partly on writers who belong to
the previous age-Oxford, Kinwelmersh, Churchyard, Sir Edward
Dyer and, perhaps, Henry VIII. Dyer, the friend of Sidney (who
left Dyer half his books), was ambassador to Denmark and elsewhere
for Elizabeth and chancellor of the Garter, some of his work
appears, also, in The Phoenix Nest, in England's Helicon and in The
Paradyse of Daynty Devises, and he was justly praised as “sweete,
solempne and of high conceit' by Puttenham in his Arte of English
8
E. L. IV.
CH. VI.


## p. 114 (#136) ############################################

114
The Song-books and Miscellanies
Poesie (1589). Younger men, however, like Ralegh and Thomas
Watson the sonneteer, also appear in Byrd's song-books. The bulk
of the poems he sets to music are anonymous; but his predilection
for didactic and religious verse gives an air as of the previous age
to his collection. Yet the voice of the new poetry is clear in some
of the pastorals. The influence of foreign poets is only seldom
directly apparent; but two, at least, of the poems appear again
one of them word for word—in the Musica Transalpina of Nicholas
Yonge, which is entirely composed of translations from French and
Italian authors made, in 1583, by 'a Gentleman for his private
delight. The authors at present identified in Dowland's song-books
are Fulke Greville, George Peele, the earl of Essex (or his chaplain
Henry Cuff), Sir Edward Dyer and Nicholas Breton. Among the
other song-books, the scanty number of names that can be men-
tioned is a testimony to the extent to which the habit of writing
lyrics prevailed among others than professed poets. And study
of these songs, composed for home use or the convenience of
a small circle of friends, with no more serious import than the
verses of Sir Benjamin Backbite or the acrostics of our grand-
fathers, leads only to deeper wonder at their perfection of form.
In them, the mood and the manner go hand in hand, as if
inevitably. There is no sense of strain, no artificial poetising, no
bombast and, in the best cases, no feebleness. There is, besides,
a quality of sweetness which is not a property of the words alone,
nor of the sense alone, and which, seeming even to be something
other than the perfect union of sound and sense, remains, in the last
resort, beyond analysis. It may, perhaps, be a quality of the time,
an essential sweetness in a class educated and civilised, but full of
the frank gaiety, the ebullience, the pagan innocence and even
the quick and stormy temper, of children. The England of the
day was full of renascence learning, and its singers swept as much
of it as they could master into their songs; but the spirit of the
land was still the spirit of childhood, frank in its loves and
hates, unsophisticated and eager for feeling and experience. The
whole beauty of the world which lay about them, spring and
summer, the flowers, morning and evening, running water, the
song of birds and the beauty of women, expresses itself in their
songs ; and, with the increase of national prosperity and the
freedom from the danger of a dominion they had always dreaded,
came an almost complete loss of that cringing sense of sin and
responsibility which the reformation and the political dangers it
had introduced had imposed upon earlier generations. England,


## p. 115 (#137) ############################################

Lyric Poetry in the Drama
115
in fact, to a great degree, was pagan, if we may use the word in
the sense that modern usage seems determined to establish. It
was bent upon enjoying its life in a very pleasant world. If a
mistress were kind, her kindness moved the swain to songs of joy;
if she were unkind, he turned on her with a pretty flouting that
is hardly less enjoyable than his praise. He did not fawn, nor
mope, nor serve, in the old, unhealthy, pseudo-chivalric fashion
of his fathers. If he were unhealthy, as, unquestionably, was
Barnabe Barnes, for instance, the fault was due to a different
cause.
Another valuable field for the lyric poetry of the time was
afforded by the drama ; and, in considering this, it is necessary
to bear in mind the important part played in the Elizabethan
drama by the children of the queen's chapel and other companies
of boy-actors who were trained musicians and made music a
prominent feature of their performances. Lyly, Marston, Jonson
and others who wrote for these companies would regard songs as
an essential feature of the book of the play, though, in certain
cases, the play was printed without them. Again, in masques,
acted by amateurs at court or in the houses of noblemen, music
played a large part, and Jonson, Daniel and other authors of
masques were careful to provide songs. Music was less cultivated
in the public theatre, but it was far from being unknown there ;
and the number of songs to be found in Shakespeare's plays would
of itself be sufficient proof that men-actors found it expedient to
consult the contemporary passion for music.
So early as the middle of the sixteenth century, we find, in
Ralph Roister Doister, a rollicking song from the hero of the
comedy; but the drama first became a fit field for the lyric with
John Lyly. His Alexander and Campaspe contains the beautiful
and familiar poem, ‘Cupid and my Campaspe played'; his Midas
is the source of a lyric almost equally well known, 'Sing to Apollo,
god of day. Lyly's example was followed, in particular, in the
plays of the university wits; and the practice became general.
Greene, Peele, Nashe, Dekker, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger,
Ford, Heywood and many others incorporated songs with their
dramas; and the custom continued till the closing of the theatres
in 1642, to be resumed at their reopening. Indeed, it was, to
some extent, under the pretext of music that Sir William D'Avenant
was able to revive the drama under the protectorate.
The practice of compiling miscellanies was continued, and the
first to show the influence of the new life and vigour was The
8-2


## p. 116 (#138) ############################################

116
The Song-books and Miscellanies
1
1
?
Phoenix Nest, ‘set foorth’ by ‘R. S. of the Inner Temple Gentle-
man,' in 1593. The Phoenix Nest is dedicated, as it were, to the
memory of the earl of Leicester, and opens with three elegies
upon Astrophell (i. e. Sidney). The volume contains poems by
.
certain anonymous writers who clearly belong to the old, rather
than to the new, school of poets. And, in the main, N. B. Gent,
as Nicholas Breton is here written, belongs to that school too.
A voluminous writer in verse and prose, Nicholas Breton, who
was born about 1542 and was probably in the service of Sidney,
or of his sister the countess of Pembroke, or of both, belongs in
spirit, by his protestantism no less than by his poetical usage, to
the school of Wyatt and Surrey. Many of his longer works are
written in the fourteen-syllable lines and the 'poulter's measure'
beloved of the poets of that school; and his use of stanzas of six
and eight lines, or of rime royal, does little to link him with
the new writers. In The Phoenix Nest, too, he indulges very
freely in the old allegory, a heritage from medieval times which
was soon to fall out of use. A strange description of a rare
garden plot is an allegorical poem in ‘poulter's measure. ' An
excellent dreame of ladies, and their riddles and The Chesse
Play are, also, allegorical. In the next anthology which we have
to consider, we shall find Breton in a different guise; but, in The
Phoenix Nest, the new note is struck most forcibly by Thomas
Lodge. The fifteen poems by that author which the volume
includes are the best of its treasures. Three of them are from his
Phillis (1593), a volume of eclogues, sonnets, elegies and other
lyrical pieces; the rest appear first in The Phoenix Nest, though
one, ‘Like desart woods,' is published in England's Helicon,
where it is given either to Sir Edward Dyer, or to 'Ignoto. '
It is worth noticing that Lodge, in one song, “The fatall starre
that at my birthday shined,' makes use of a metre which might
be scanned as, and is clearly modelled upon, alcaics, but is, in
practice, composed of iambic feet. The earl of Oxford has a
charming lyric, “What cunning can expresse,' and it is possible that
the longest poem in the volume, A most rare and excellent
dreame, is the work of Greene. The dream is the favourite one
of the visit of a lady to her sleeping lover. Her beauties are
described, and his parlous state explained. Then follows a long
argument on love, of the kind that had not yet passed out of
fashion; and, on the relenting of his mistress, the lover wakes.
There is much of the old school in the matter, but little in the
manner. The stanzas in rime royal move freely and strongly, and


## p. 117 (#139) ############################################

England's Helicon
117
the whole is a good specimen of the poetry of the time. It needs,
however, only to place it side by side with such a lyric as Lodge's
'My bonnie Lasse thine eie,' in the same volume, to realise the
immensely enlarged field in which the poet had to work. "Sweete
Violets (Loves paradice) that spred' is a good example of the long
stanza of complicated structure and involved rime-sequence which
the poets of the day used with rare skill, and which led the way in
time to the formal ode,
The next miscellany to be published has been generally found
the most interesting and beautiful of all. The first edition of
England's Helicon was published in 1600; it appears to have
been projected by John Bodenham, and, possibly, collected by him,
the editorial work being carried out by a certain ‘A, B. , who has not
been identified. A second edition appeared in 1614 with a few
additional poems.
In Englands Helicon, we find the best of the pastoral and
lyric poetry of the age. The only blot on the collection is the
excessive space allotted to Bartholomew Young, or Yong, whose
poems, taken from his translation of Montemayor's Diana, are
not on a level with those of the other contributors. A list of the
poets drawn upon for the collection will give some idea of its
value. Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, E[dmund] B[olton),
Michael Drayton, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, Nicholas Breton,
Shepherd Tony, George Peele, John Dickenson, Henry Howard
earl of Surrey, Thomas Watson, John Wotton, Shakespeare (? ),
Richard Barnfield, the earl of Oxford, Sir Edward Dyer, Sir
Walter Ralegh, H[enry] C[onstable), Bartholomew Yong, W[illiam]
S[mith], Fulke Greville (? ), Christopher Marlowe, William Browne
and Christopher Brooke. The large number of poems subscribed
'Ignoto' are also unusually interesting. Of these, three were
attributed in the first edition to W[alter] R[alegh]; but, in later
copies of that issue, a slip of paper bearing the word 'Ignoto' has
been pasted over the initials, though a manuscript list of poems
made by Francis Davison (editor of A Poetical Rapsody) and
now in the British Museum' ascribes them to Ralegh. The
same signature 'Ignoto' stands, in several cases, as Bullen has
pointed out, for a mysterious poet, ‘A. W. ', of whom nothing
but his work is known, and that mainly through A Poetical
Rapsody.
The poems by Sidney in England's Helicon are taken from
Astrophel and Stella, Arcadia, The May-Lady and A Poetical
1 MS Harl. 280.
1


## p. 118 (#140) ############################################

118
The Song-books and Miscellanies
Rapsody, while one, An excellent sonnet of a nymph, appears in
England's Helicon, probably for the first time.
The three poems by Spenser are taken from The Shepheards
Calender and his Astrophel, the elegy on the death of Sidney.
Edmund Bolton, the author, probably, of the four poems signed
'E. B. ', which include a particularly beautiful carol, was a retainer
of George Villiers duke of Buckingham, and belongs, properly, to
the Jacobean age. The poems of Drayton in Englands Helicon are
taken from his Eclogues, in Poems Lyric and Pastoral, and his
Idea, while two appear for the first time in this volume. Greene's
are taken from Menaphon and Francesco's Fortunes; Peele’s from
The Hunting of Cupid and The Arraignment of Paris; Lodge's
from Rosalind, A Margarite of America and Phillis, while two
appear here for the first time; and Watson's mainly from his
EKATOMIAQIA, while one appeared first in The Phoenix
Nest and another is not known before its appearance here.
Nicholas Breton, as we have said, appears here at his best.
There are eight of his poems in the book, six of which do not appear
elsewhere, and, of these six, one is in the old 'poulter's measure,'
and three in the once popular fourteen-syllable line. But Breton's
use of these almost discarded metres differs greatly from that of
the lesser followers of Wyatt and Surrey. By dividing the long
lines into two and giving them rimes at each pause-a practice
that had been followed before-he breaks the monotony; and
in his hands these measures no longer jog,' but flow. There is
a buoyancy and a liveliness in his verse which is the very spirit
of the lyrics of his age; and, though he never tries the elaborate
harmonies of some of the writers in this miscellany, his note is
clear and perfect in the short lyric outbursts which he too seldom
attempted. His longer narrative, religious and allegorical poems,
The Pilgrimage to Paradise, The Countesse of Penbrooke's love,
The Soules immortall Crowne and others, which are written,
some in fourteeners, some in rime royal, or stanzas of six or eight
decasyllables, lack variety, and cannot stand by the side of Samuel
Daniel's for dignity or depth. Nicholas Breton's best work is to
be found in the short lyrics, and in the delightful Passionate
Shepheard, a volume containing pastorals, many of which are
written in the trochaic measure of four feet, the lightness and
grace of which was then becoming fully recognised.
It seems probable, though it is strange, that Shepherd Tony,
the sweet singer of England's Helicon, is no other than the
Grub Street patriarch, the translator and playwright, Anthony
|


## p. 119 (#141) ############################################

Richard Barnfield
119
Munday. The evidence rests mainly on the charming song,
‘Beauty sat bathing by a spring,' which occurs both in England's
Helicon and in Munday's translation of Primaleon. His work in
this miscellany is far superior to that in his Banquet of Dainty
Conceits (1588). He replies to the old pastoral, 'Phylida was a
fayer mayde,' which, as we have seen, Englands Helicon ascribes
to Surrey, and makes a lovelier melody by his mixed use of iambics
and trochaics. In The Woodman's Walk, he carries us back, both
by his use of the divided fourteener and the old subject of the
failings of court and city life, to an earlier day; in ‘Fair nymphes,
sit ye here by me,' he is well abreast of his age in the long stanzas
of short lines with interwoven rimes, which discuss pleasantly and
sweetly the pleasures and pains of love-only to break at the close
into a hymn in its praise.
John Dickenson, the author of three very dainty little songs,
is a little known poet, whose Shepheardes Complaint, in which
all three occur, was published in 1594. John Wotton, who,
possibly, was the half-brother of Sir Henry Wotton mentioned by
Izaak Walton, is the author of one very famous and delightful
poem, Damaetas' Jig in praise of his love, beginning ‘Jolly shep-
herd, shepherd on a hill,' in which is concentrated the whole
quality of the collection of pastorals, and the very breath of this
springtime of poetry. The song ascribed to Shakespeare is the
'On a day (alack the day ! )' which appeared in the first edition of
Love's Labour's Lost, and, again, in the Sonnets to Sundry notes
of Music appended to The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). Both in
that volume and in England's Helicon the songs immediately
following are ‘My flocks feede not,' and 'As it fell upon a day. ' Of
these two, the latter had already appeared in the Poems in divers
Humors attached to The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, by Richard
Barnfield, published in 1598, together with the sonnet, “If Musique
and sweet Poetrie agree,' which also forms part of The Passionate
Pilgrim. This is not the place to examine the ascription of
particular songs: the best opinion determines for Barnfield's
authorship of the sonnet; that of the 'ode''As it fell upon a day'
is more doubtful. The fact that, in England's Helicon, it follows
immediately upon ‘My flocks feede not,' and is entitled Another
1 See Bullen, Lyrics from Romances and Prose-Tracts of the Elizabethan Age (1890),
pp. xviii, 77. His edition of England's Helicon, in which (p. xvii) he scouts the notion
that Munday and Shepherd Tony could be one, was published in 1887. The notion
that Shepherd Tony was a pseudonym of Anthony Copley was never tenable.
See Grosart's and Arber's reprints of Barnfield's poems and Henneman in An
English Miscellany (Oxford, 1901), p. 158.
6
>


## p. 120 (#142) ############################################

I 20 The Song-books and Miscellanies
of the same shepherd's, is part of the evidence for his author-
ship of that poem also. Barnfield, who was born in 1574, in
Shropshire, was educated at Oxford and died in 1627, was not
a professional writer. His three volumes: The Affectionate
Shepheard (1594), Cynthia (1595) and The Encomion of Lady
Pecunia (1598), were all published before he was twenty-five, and
bear evidence of being not so much the result of any strong
impulse to poetry as the elegant amusement of a young scholar.
All reveal a love of strangeness in subject, of conceit and far-
fetched imagery. The Affectionate Shepheard begins by elabora-
ting the second Eclogue of Vergil into a passionate address by an
aged man to a youth named Ganymede (to whom, also, a number
of sonnets in Cynthia are composed in the same vein), and passes
on to give a great deal of good, if ill-arranged, advice on the same
moral level as that of Polonius. For Cynthia, he claims that it is
the first imitation of the verse of The Faerie Queene: its subject
is a classical allegory, leading to a panegyric on queen Elizabeth,
and the volume contains also a narrative 'tragedy'on Cassandra,
and an 'ode,' in which a lying shepherd is heard to complain that
his love for Ganymede has been ousted by the greater beauty of
a lass, whose name we learn to be Eliza. In the introductory
letter to The Encomion of Lady Pecunia, Barnfield openly admits
his search for an uncommon, novel subject. The poem is a satire
on the power of wealth: it is followed by The Complainte of
Poetrie for the Death of Liberalitie, a topic to which he refers
more than once in his other works; and by an estrif between
Conscience and Covetousness. Then follow those Poems in divers
Humors, to which reference was made above. The traces of the
poetic exercise are clear in all Barnfield's work. It is at its best
and its pleasantest in the moments when, forgetting his intellectual
foppery and affectation, he sings naturally and sweetly about the
country. His descriptions of country scenes are sometimes ad-
mirable, and he has a quaint and pleasing way of dropping simple
country similes into the most elaborate of his fancies. His
favourite metre is the decasyllabic line, which he manages with
dignity and variety in stanzas of a quatrain and a couplet, or of
rime royal; and there are some good hexameters, as there are
certainly some extremely bad ones, in an extraordinarily 'con-
ceited' poem called Hellens Rape, or a light Lanthorne for light
Ladies. His vocabulary is rich and often strange; though not so
much with the archaism of his ‘king of poets,' Spenser, as with
the homelier usages of his own day. Another prominent feature
1


## p. 121 (#143) ############################################

!
Pastoral Poems
I 21
1
in Barnfield's work is his ardent and outspoken admiration for
Spenser, his friend Watson, Sidney, Drayton and other contem-
porary poets. Bartholomew Yong we have mentioned already,
and somewhat in disparagement. In him stands out prominently
the affectation of the time, to which we shall return, and neither
in spirit nor in melody is he worthy of the important place assigned
to him in the volume. William Smith, a rather pedantic writer,
was the author of Chloris (1596), and Christopher Brooke, whose
spirited, if conventional, Epithalamium closes the volume, is known
as the collaborator with Browne and Wither in The Shepheards
Pipe (1614), and belongs, with Browne himself, to the generation
following. To this list must be added a number of anonymous
authors, of whom 'W. H. ', the author of two very graceful and
charming songs, may, possibly, be William Hunnis, whom we met
in The Paradyse of Daynty Devises.
It is clear, then, that the compiler of the book looked far and
wide through the literature of the day for the pastorals to form
his collection. Plays, romances, sonnet-sequences, song-books (for
many of the poems in England: Helicon are taken from Byrd's
or Morley's books), all were laid under contribution; and he must
be allowed to have been a man of fine taste. It is difficult to
refer to these poems without using expressions of admiration that
must seem excessive; but to open any page (unless, indeed, one
hits on the laborious Bartholomew Yong) is to meet with some-
thing of great beauty. The book contains the best of the lyrics
with which Lodge, that various master of light music, dotted his
romances. Peele wrote but few lyrics, but the best of them are
here, and Greene seems to give voice not only to the spirit
of the renascence with its gay appetites, its rich fancies and its
humanism, but to the graver spirit which is held to be character-
istically English, and is frequent in the lyric poetry of his day,
rarely as it appears in the book under notice.
Pastoral, as has often been pointed out, is always more or less
an affectation. It is 'the townsman's dream of country life! ' It
has always been written in stages of high civilisation, by Theo-
critus, Vergil, or Mantuan. It lends itself freely to allegorical
use; the comparison of country innocence with the venality and
falsehood of city and court life leads, naturally, to moralising,
and that strain runs through pastoral in England from Barnabe
Googe to Lycidas. In Englands Helicon, and in much of the
pastoral poetry of Elizabethan days, it is another aspect that we
· Chambers's English Pastorals, p. xxxix.


## p. 122 (#144) ############################################

I 22 The
Song-books and Miscellanies
find. The convention is adopted, but for a different purpose; and,
in the end, it amounts to no more than the nomenclature. A man
is not less a man for calling himself a shepherd, and, to the
Elizabethan courtier, flocks and herds, thrushes and nightingales,
brooks and trees, must have been objects at least as familiar as
streets and houses. For it is noticeable that, in spite of much
classical imagery and talk of Phoebus, Diana and the rest, and
many new versions of classical stories, it is English (country of
which the pastoral poets chiefly sing in this volume. We are
to imagine a better climate than we have; but that is usually
the greatest demand which the convention makes. It is not the
poetry of nature, for nature is not studied as a source of con-
solation or strength or for any interest in itself: it remains the
background of the loves of the shepherd; but, in dramatising
himself against a background which he knew (though he chose
to call it by strange names), the poet gains a good opportunity
of expressing his feelings with more freedom than direct speech
would allow. A shepherd is a simple and downright person;
to pose as a shepherd is to have the advantages enjoyed by
simple and downright persons. And, since the single subject
of the poems in Englands Helicon is love, that advantage is
valuable.
The result is a strange but delightful mixture of simplicity
and affectation. There is all the colour of association with classical
poetry, the eager absorption of classical imagery characteristic
of the renascence, combined with the naked feelings of the actual
On the language of the poets, the combination could not
fail to have the important effect of lending it richness and colour;
but, through the pleasant tinsel, the native quality shows clearly.
The affectation only becomes oppressive in the case of writers like
Bartholomew Yong, whose feeling was insufficiently ardent to
endow the borrowed form with life. His Arsilius, Meliseа, Alanius
and the rest strike the reader as pieces of pedantry, while Lodge's
Montanus (we are speaking only of the lyrics), or some unknown
poet's Philistus, or Daphne, or Phyllida, are men and women,
The contrast between the technical accomplishment of these
poets and of those of the earlier school is very great. In place of
the few, repeated measures, the often cramped movement and the
halting progress of the early poetry, we find ease, grace, swift-
ness and freedom in metres of all kinds. The long fourteener
and 'poulter's measure' have been divided and flow like rippling
streams; the decasyllable has gained strength, dignity and variety,
man.
1


## p. 123 (#145) ############################################

A Poetical Rapsody
123
and great dexterity has been attained in the use of short lines.
There is no end to the ingenuity of these poets in the arrange-
ment of long, trilling stanzas, in which closely wrought rime-
construction keeps the melody from feebleness.
The way in
which subtlety and ingenuity are combined with simplicity is one
of the most remarkable qualities of the Elizabethan lyric. That
the poem is a work of delicate and conscious art is plain ; the
devices of echo, refrain and repetition are freely used, and long
and difficult schemes of rime and metre are sustained throughout.
It was this age, moreover, that saw the introduction into English
poetry of the shaped verses’ already common in Italy and France.
The writer's object was to make his verse, when printed, take the
shape of an egg, a pillar, a triangle, or one of many other shapes
mentioned by Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie. It
seems probable that the learned Thomas Watson, author of The
EKATOMIIARIA, was the first to introduce the practice into
England; his example takes the form of 'a Pasquin Pillar. A
classical origin was claimed for the idea of the shaped verse, the
names of Anacreon and Simmias of Rhodes being cited; and the
fashion, which did little more than take root in Elizabethan days,
grew under the reigns of her successors into great popularity,
issuing not only in the pleasing and appropriate shaped verses
of Herbert, but into most fantastic absurdities in less poetical
hands. In spite, however, of occasional instances of such mis-
directed ingenuity, the Elizabethan lyric remains a bird-song in
sweetness and spontaneity, and the result is one which can only
be attained in the rare moments when accomplishment and in-
spiration are on a level.
The last of the Elizabethan anthologies which need be seriously
considered is A Poetical Rapsody issued by two brothers, Francis
and Walter Davison, in 1602. Francis Davison was the eldest
son of the secretary Davison who was Elizabeth's scapegoat
in the matter of the execution of Mary queen of Scots. In
his youth, Francis was sent to travel with his tutor, and it was
while abroad that he wrote a prose work, the Relation of Saxony,
which was highly praised by Anthony Bacon, and also (according
to his letter to the reader) the poems which are collected in the
Rapsody. Walter, his younger brother, became, it appears, a
soldier in the Low Countries and died young.
The volume opens with a dedicatory sonnet to William Herbert
earl of Pembroke; and the first contributor is Sir John Davies,
whose work is considered in another chapter of this volume.


## p. 124 (#146) ############################################

I 24 The Song-books and Miscellanies
-
Then comes the poem called The Lie, which is commonly, but
erroneously, supposed to have been written by Ralegh on the eve
of his execution; and then two pastorals by Sidney. Soon after
these follows a Dialogue between two shepheards, Thenot and
Piers in praise of Astrea, which was written by Mary countess
of Pembroke, patron and friend of all the poets of the day,
the 'Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother' of William Browne's
immortal epitaph. It is possible that this dialogue was written
for one of queen Elizabeth's visits to Wilton. Francis and Walter
Davison themselves contribute a large number of poems: eclogues,
sonnets,' odes, elegies, madrigals and epigrams, translations from
s
Horace, Martial, Petrarch, Jodelle and others—the work, mainly,
of persons of taste and education rather than of poets born,
though one song, In praise of a beggar's life, has become familiar
to many through its quotation by Izaak Walton in The Compleat
Angler, as 'Frank Davison's song, which he made forty years ago. '
One of Francis Davison's eclogues—written in a form of the long
and elaborate stanza over which the poets of the day had great
mastery-is a specially good example of the ease with which
they moved amid the conventions of pastoralism. The shepherd
Eubulus is no other than Elizabeth's late counsellor, secretary
Davison, and his cruel mistress is the queen. It is a touching and
manly plea for the poet's own disgraced father, written in a form
which could deceive nobody. A specimen of unusual ingenuity
is the long poem called Complaint, ascribed, in the Rapsody,
to Francis Davison, and, in Davison's own manuscript', to 'A. W.
Not only the eight rime-endings, but the actual words that com-
pose them, are the same in each of the eight stanzas. The age
delighted in echoes, and was constantly experimenting in metre
and rime, but, usually, with more artistic purpose than in this
instance. The madrigals of the brothers were very popular and
are found in many of the song-books.
The miscellaneous contributors to A Poetical Rapsody include
Greene (with a translation of Anacreon, from Orpharion), Campion,
Henry Wotton, T[homas) S[pilman) or Spelman (a kinsman of the
Davisons, who also translated Anacreon), Spenser, Constable and
Charles Best, with, possibly, Joshua Sylvester and Ralegh (to the
dialogue, ‘Shepherd, what's love, I pray thee tell,' we have referred
before, and the volume contains another of the many poems which
the opinion of the time was ready to attribute to Ralegh).
But the largest and the most remarkable contributor is the
i See above, p. 117.
>


## p. 125 (#147) ############################################

A. W.
125
mysterious 'A, W. , whom all efforts have failed to identify,
but whose songs worthily found place in many anthologies
and song-books of the age. The earlier part of the volume
contains a number of eclogues, the name of the shepherd being
Cuddy. In these, the author shows himself a close student and
follower of Spenser. Rustic or antique phraseology is almost
unknown in Englands Helicon. Of the thirty-five words and
phrases given by Bullen in the glossarial index to his edition of
that book, four, at the most, were not in common use in the
educated speech of the time. ‘A. W. delights in flavouring his
eclogues, like Spenser, with words that shall be racy of the soil.
Later in the volume we find a number of anonymous poems,
heralded by three admirable Petrarchian sonnets, all of which are
attributed to 'A. W. ' in the manuscript list compiled by Francis
Davison. There is a wide difference between these poems. It is
difficult to believe that the three sets of hexameters on the death
of Sidney are the work of the same author as The Tomb of Dead
Desire or the madrigal, 'Thine eyes so bright'; and it is not im-
possible that the 'A. W. ' of Francis Davison's list stands, not for the
initials of a single poet, but for the words, “anonymous writers. '
A curious fact is that the poem mentioned above, which Izaak
Walton ascribes to Davison himself, is initialled 'A. W. by Davison
in his list, and appears among the group in the Rapsody ascribed
to that author. If these poems were, indeed, the work of a single
author, he is sufficiently interesting to demand further research.
His range is wide—from the solemn measures of a poem to Time,
which, with others, recalls strongly the antithetical, paradoxical
work of years before, to the sweetest of little madrigals, that sing
themselves irresistibly. He indulges, too, in some use of classical
metres. To his hexameters we have referred. He uses, also, a
metre which he calls the Phaleuciack:
Time nor place did I want, what held me tongue-tied ?
and, on one occasion, he rimes the lines of this structure, pre-
fixing an apology to his lady for so strange a metre. ' A set of
sapphics upon the passion of Christ shows, also, that he was
affected by the movement which started with Spenser and Gabriel
Harvey and led even Campion astray for a while. His translations
from Anacreon can hardly be set beside Thomas Stanley's.
In treating the lyrics of the song-books and miscellanies we
have dealt almost exclusively with what may be called the
renascence elements in them, the gaiety, the paganism, the use of


## p. 126 (#148) ############################################

126 The Song-books and Miscellanies
mythology and classical allusion. It must not be supposed, how-
ever, that the more peculiarly English note, as it is commonly
considered—the reflective, religious and didactic note-is absent.
It is frequent even in the song-books, William Byrd in particular
having, clearly, a fondness for sad subjects as vehicles for his music.
In his First Book we find the famous poem by Sir Edward Dyer,
‘My mind to me a kingdom is,' a perfect type of the moral poetry-
the poetry of independence of character and sobriety of life-which
was common at the time, and of which Samuel Daniel's poem To
the Lady Margaret Countess of Cumberland, beginning ‘He that
of such a height hath built his mind,' Campion's The man of Life
upright, Sir Henry Wotton's 'How happy is he born and taught,'
are other notable instances. Byrd's Second Book is largely com-
posed of short moral and didactic poems; and it is plain that this
reflective vein ran as steadily in the heyday of Elizabethan glory
as in earlier years. Barnfield's Ganymede is treated in The
Affectionate Shepheard to a discourse on morality in the second
day's lament which gives, perhaps, a truer picture of the genuine
sentiments and character of that respectable man and good poet
than the remainder of the poem. And, as the heyday passed
towards sunset, as the ebullient joy in life and love died down, and
the glory of the reign was clouded by troubles and shadows of
coming evils, this note is heard more clearly. The last decade of
Elizabeth's reign was a time of thought and reflection, even
of apprehension; and instead of, or side by side with, the notes of
apparently 'careless rapture,' we find the graver poetry of men of
piety and philosophy.


## p. 127 (#149) ############################################

CHAPTER VII
ROBERT SOUTHWELL SAMUEL DANIEL
REFERENCE was made at the close of the previous chapter to the
poetry of piety and philosophy which became prominent in the
last decade of Elizabeth's reign. Such poetry falls, roughly, into
two classes, of which the two poets whose names give the title to
this chapter are representative: Southwell of the purely religious
poetry, Daniel of the humanistic and historical.
In purely religious poetry, the period was not rich. There were
few poets who did not, at one time or another, write a religious
poem; on the other hand, the whole body of religious verse, if
collected, would not amount to a large total, and only one impor-
tant poet of the age is, specifically, a religious poet. Round Robert
Southwell, the Jesuit, in late Elizabethan days no less than in our
own, floated a glamour due to the story of his life and death.
Born in 1561, of an illegitimate branch of the old Catholic family
of Southwell, probably at his father's estate of Horsham St Faith
near Norwich, he is said to have been stolen from his cradle by a
gypsy who was tempted by his uncommon beauty. At an early
age, he came under the influence of the Jesuits, being sent to the
college at Douay, and thence transferred to Paris. Thomas Darby-
shire, his chief guide in Paris, had resigned, on Elizabeth's accession,
the archdeaconry of Essex which he had held under Mary. Southwell
early showed an intense desire to belong to the Society of Jesus,
and, after a period of probation which he found almost intolerably
long, succeeded in making his own way to Rome, where he was
admitted to the noviciate at the age of seventeen. At the end of
his noviciate, he was appointed prefect of studies at the English
college in Rome, a position which he held until, in 1586, he was
selected to accompany Henry Garnett into England on the work of
the English mission inaugurated by Parsons and Edmund Campion
in 1580. The call appeared to him to be an almost certain promise
of the martyrdom on which his desires had long been set.


## p. 128 (#150) ############################################

128 Robert Southwell. Samuel Daniel
Nevertheless, he carried on his perilous work in England for six years,
before he wasdecoyed, in 1592, into the hands of the informer Topcliffe
and imprisoned in Topcliffe's house in Westminster. After thirteen
applications of the torture and two years and a half of imprison-
ment, Southwell was executed at Tyburn, in February 1594/5.
It was in prison that his poems were mainly written. When
poets sing of the shortness and the deceptive character of life, one
is often tempted to wonder whether the sentiments are not the
purely conventional utterances of men sitting at ease in comfort-
able homes, or merely signs of reaction from an excess of pleasure.
From Southwell's own statements, we know that his body never
recovered from the tortures it had suffered, and, from his letters
and journals, that such a death as he expected had long been his
highest ambition. This certificate of sincerity, combined with a
vivid imagination and an epigrammatic keenness of expression,
imparts to his poems a brilliance only tempered by the sweetness
of nature to which they, with everything we know of the poet,
bear witness.
In writing his poetry, Southwell may be said to have had
before him three motives : the expression of his own thoughts
and feelings, to which life in prison gave no other outlet; the
comfort and edification of his fellow Catholics; and a third, which
gives them a peculiar literary interest. His poems were not pub-
lished in his lifetime ; but that he contemplated publication is
clear from the letter to his cousin which prefaces Saint Peters
Complaint. His object, like Milton's in the following century,
was to rescue the art of poetry from the worldly uses to which it
had been almost solely devoted.
Most poets,' he writes, ' now busie themselves in expressing such passions
as onely serve for testimonies to howe unworthy affections they have wedded
their wills. And, because the best course to let them see the errour of their
works is to weave a new webbe in their owne loome, 1 have here laide a few
course threds together. '
There can be no doubt that Southwell had read Shakespeare's
Venus and Adonis, which was published in 1593 and at once
became the most popular poem of the day. He seems, indeed, to
have regarded it as the capital instance of the poetry he wished to
supplant. His Saint Peters Complaint, published in 1595, soon
after his death, is written in the metre of Shakespeare's poem, and
the preliminary address from the author to the reader contains a
line, 'Stil finest wits are stilling Venus' rose,' which may be a
direct reference to it, and certainly would be considered so by
>
fal
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Robert Southwell
129
Southwell's readers. And, if Southwell had read Shakespeare, it
is clear, from a number of interesting correspondences to be found
in their works, that Shakespeare had read Southwell. At any
rate, the attempt to give to sacred poetry the merit and charm of
profane did not pass unnoticed. Saint Peters Complaint was
attacked by Joseph Hall in his eighth satire in the line : ‘Now
good St Peter weeps pure Helicon. '
Saint Peters Complaint is a long poem describing the incidents
of the last days of the life of Christ, seen in the light of the
remorse of the saint for having denied his Master; and its theme is
chiefly remarkable for the great number and ingenuity of the
'conceits' which it embodies.