No More Learning

But
the list of books which he read during those years, a list which is
extant in his own handwriting, is that of a literary epicure, and
contains but one work of jurisprudence, namely the Institutes of
Justinian. A valuable letter which he wrote to Sir George Keith
of Cowburn gives an account of his life abroad, and of the vivid
impression which the beauty of certain pictures made upon his
mind. 'A stately diction, recalling the language of his favourite
romances; a love of beauty. . . a fanciful vein of moralising: these
are the marked features of the young student's letters, and not
less of the maturer writings of the poet? '
He returned in 1609 to Scotland, and, in the following year, ho
again came to London. His father died in London the same year.
William Drummond returned at the age of twenty-five to Haw-
thornden, and, as has been said, did not henceforth swerve from his
resolution to adventure into the unknown kingdom of thought.
The circumstances of his life brought him into singular touch
with the shape of death, and the great mystery of death seems
have inspired his early life with a strange attractiveness. His first
published poems were written to commemorate the death of prince
Henry, who had died on 6 November 1612. In 1613, appeared
Drummond's pastoral elegy Tears on the Death of Moeliades,
with a sonnet and two epitaphs. The poem was published by
Andro Hart, and a second edition was printed in the following
year.
Of all the elegances which were the fashion of his day, he
makes use, and, though they cannot but seem artificial to a
modern ear, they came so naturally to Drummond that they do
not for a moment obscure the deep sincerity of the poem.
1 Ward, introduction to bis edition of Drummond's works.


## p. 152 (#174) ############################################

152
The Successors of Spenser
6
Especially was he pleased at such play on words, as 'O hyacinths,
for aye your ai keeps still' or 'Raise whom they list to thrones,
enthron'd dethrone,' and subtle illustrations drawn from the
classics. Sir William Alexander, a Scots poet of some distinction,
wrote a complimentary sonnet to the poem. He was some
seventeen years senior to Drummond, and a friendship, which had
lately begun by a chance visit, lasted between the two until Sir
William's death.
In 1616, the Tears on the Death of Moeliades was reprinted,
but the chief place in the volume was given to a sequence of
sonnets, songs and madrigals in which the poet sings the praises of
his lady and mourns her untimely death. For again and most darkly
had the shadow of death fallen across his path. Just before his
intended marriage with Mary Cunningham in 1615, the lady died.
He had sought seclusion when worldly honours lay within his grasp,
and the disaster did not send him to the world for distraction: it
helped him to become more deeply contemplative. A continued
consciousness of the end of things, noticeable in all his works, did
not afflict him, but, rather, lifted him gently a little above the
quiet world in which he chose to live, and filled his songs and
poems with that sad sweetness to which they owe their peculiar
charm. The lines which end with 'Death since grown sweet,
begins to be desir'd,' seem to have a faint foreshadowing of the
idea which turned Shelley's Adonais into a triumph song. There
is no bitterness in the moods to which these poems give expression.
His large nature was too enamoured of death's scope and mystery
to feel small bitterness. But, for him, the quiet beauty of the
country possessed a deeper meaning, of memory and, in some sort,
of anticipation.
. . and she is gone, 0 woe!
Woods cut again do grow,
Bud doth the rose and daisy, winter done,
But we, once dead, no more do see the sun.
The elegances of his manner, which were so part of him that
they never left him, put into abrupt relief the simplicity of such
lines as these; and it is this sudden simplicity which shows that,
in mind, Drummond was more akin to Sidney, whose very phrases
he weaves into his verse, than to any other English poet.
His next published work was a poem of very different calibre
and of small value. Its elegance is unalloyed, and, as an exercise
in verse, it is almost perfect. In May 1617, king James visited
Scotland, and Forth Feasting is the felicitous title of the verses


## p. 153 (#175) ############################################

Drummond of Hawthornden
153
which Drummond's courtly instinct bade him compose to celebrate
the king's visit. The verses are not memorable. But in the
following year an incident both memorable and characteristic
occurred. Joseph Davis arrived at Hawthornden bearing an
introduction from Michael Drayton, for whose work Drummond
cared greatly. He wrote to Drayton and, though the two poets
never met, they began a correspondence which continued to the
year of Michael Drayton's death in 1631. This was a kind of
friendship which would appeal strongly to Drummond and to
which his nature responded. Ben Jonson, who, on his northern
tour, visited Hawthornden the same year, would have had greater
sympathy with Drummond, if Drummond had not been disturbed
by the man's vigorous actual presence. The world of letters,
however, is the richer for their meeting, although many of their
arguments must have been distasteful to Drummond's sensitive
nature. 'He dissuaded me from poetry, for that she beggared
him when he might have been a rich lawyer, physician or
merchant, writes Drummond, whose own opinion of riches is
beautifully put in The Cypress Grove—They are like to thorns
which, laid on an open hand, are easily blown away and wound
the closing and hard-gripping. The two men were at funda-
mental odds. Ben Jonson was a great poet almost in spite of
himself: Drummond used all the forces at the command of his
exquisite nature to become a better poet than he ever could be.
Flowers of Sion appeared in 1623, and to the poems was
appended a prose essay on death, The Cypress Grove, in which
Drummond reaches his highest sustained level. The poems are
religious in the widest and best meaning of that word. Like
Shelley, Drummond, beyond all the narrow limits of dogma, gave
voice to the spirit of Christ's teaching, the ultimate spirit of all
religion, namely, that God is love. He saw and sang the truth
less clearly, and, therefore, less beautifully, than Shelley, but
there is much in them of surprising similarity. In Drummond's
poems, witness especially the Hymn of the Fairest Fair, the idea
remained a beautiful theory, whereas Shelley applied the idea to
human life and worked it out in amazing detail, helped by his
profound knowledge of human nature. Drummond is a link, as
it were, between Spenser's great conception of Beauty, as the
informing spirit of life, and Shelley's greater application of that
idea to human affairs. To have reached such a point of view amid
the fierce religious quarrels of that day shows the strong indepen-
dence of Drummond's mind. But he was inspired by his personal


## p. 154 (#176) ############################################

154
The Successors of Spenser
griefs, by his personal difficulties in finding an answer to great
problems; he was not at all a reformer; he had no passionate wish
to alleviate the sorrow of humanity. Therein lies at once his
strength and his limitation.
He found at length a personal answer; and, having created
his faith and won through to a certain tranquillity, he no longer
wrote poetry, except as an occasional exercise, or to lament a
friend's death. He lived twenty-six years after the appearance of
Flowers of Sion and, from one point of view, his life in that year
began. He took interest in the stirring events that followed the
death of James I; he wrote a history of Scotland; he married and
had many children; he wrote topical prose pamphlets; he travelled
he rebuilt his house.
Just as the solemn mystery of death fashioned Drummond into
a poet, so the joy of life inspired George Wither his contemporary.
There is no hesitation and little deep thought in his poetry. But
for him all the common things of life were decked with the grace
of poetry. 'Before Wither, writes Charles Lamb, 'no one ever
celebrated its power at home, the wealth and the strength which this
divine gift confers upon its possessor . . . it seems to have been left
to Wither to discover that poetry was a present possession as well
as a rich reversion. ' Nor was his life passed, as was Drummond's,
in seclusion: it was caught up in the fury of his times. He was
born in 1588 at Bentworth, near Alton, Hampshire. John Greaves,
the neighbouring vicar, taught him his rudiments, and, from the
vicar's care, he went in 1604 to Magdalen college, Oxford, where
he spent two years only before he was recalled by his father to
the farm. A country life, however, did not satisfy his nature.
He went to London in 1610, to try his fortune as a writer. Little
is known of his early doings-except that he made the acquaintance
of William Browne-until, in 1612, his elegy on the death of prince
Henry, dedicated to Sir Robert Sidney, was published. The book
contained elegies on the prince and a dialogue between the prince's
ghost and Great Britain. Among the mass of verse which prince
Henry's death occasioned, Wither's effort attracted small notice.
The subject was not so congenial to him as it was to William
Drummond, though the dialogue gave some scope to his vein of
unpedantic moralising. But, in the following year, the marriage of
princess Elizabeth with the elector palatine offered him a more
suitable subject, and the princess was so pleased by his book of
Neptial Poems that she became his best patron. Though flattery


## p. 155 (#177) ############################################

George Wither
155
1
meant favour, he, in that age of flatterers, was too honest to be
servile, and his next book Abuses stript and whipt or Satiricall
Poems had an original and a characteristic dedication which ran
'to Himselfe G. W. wisheth all happiness. The satire was popular,
but displeasing to the authorities, and all the immediate happiness
the book obtained for Wither was imprisonment in the Marshalsea.
The reason why the book should have brought such summary
injustice upon its author is difficult to understand, for, unlike later
satirists, he made no personal attacks, but tilted in a genial and
not a very original manner against the general vices of human
nature. However, in the Marshalsca he was confined for some
months and, during his confinement, wrote pastorals, which were
published in 1615 under the title The Shepherds Hunting. In
the fourth eclogue, in praising the poetry of 'my Willie,' by whom
he meant his friend William Browne, he extolled the power of
poetry in general and wrote his most beautiful, if not his best
known, lines. They are written in the measure to which
the wits of Queen Anne's days contemptuously gave the name of Namby-
Pamby, in ridicule of Ambrose Philips . . . but Wither, whose darling measure
it seems to have been, may shew, that in skilful hands it is capable of ex-
pressing the subtilest movements of passion 1.
Of the same pastoral description were the poems that he next
published: Fidelia, privately printed in 1617, and Faire Virtue,
the Mistresse of Phil Arete, the revision, probably, of earlier
work, in 1622. The pastoral in Wither's hands was not a town
convention: however conventional the shepherds may be, the
freshness of the fields breathes in his poems, and an intimate
knowledge of country lore is manifested on every page. The
hounds of Philarete the Hunter are named after human virtues
and human vices, but they have the character and bearing of real
dogs; and they show, pleasantly enough, that George Wither,
whatever may be the value of his judgment of men and their ways,
knew and loved the ways of his pack with discriminating insight.
But, between 1617 and 1622, he also wrote two works of a
singularly diverse nature: Hymnes and Songs of the Church—of
which king James approved, but of which his clergy disapproved-
and Wither's Motto. The motto was Nec habeo, nec careo, nec
curo; it is partly a satire, and chiefly an extolling of the possibilities
of his own personality:
My intent was to draw the picture of mine own heart. . . . But my principal
intention was, by recording those thoughts, to confirm my own resolution
and to prevent such alterations, as time and infirmities may work upon me.
i Charles Lamb.


## p. 156 (#178) ############################################

156
The Successors of Spenser
>
6
>
Though the verses are as genial and harmless as is the intention,
they gave offence to those in authority, and, again, Wither was shut
up in the Marshalsea.
And here his first poetic period ends. He wrote countless
topical pamphlets in prose and verse, which have been collected
and printed by the Spenser Society, but nothing of literary note
except The Scholars Purgatory (c. 1625), in which, with his
customary frankness, he defends himself against those stationers
who "unchristianly vilify and scandalize alsoe' his hymns and
songs, and passes from personal defence and his usual attractive
self-revelation to an interesting dissertation on the subject of
"divine' poems in general.
When the Civil war broke out, Wither joined the parliamen-
tarians. In 1639, he was a captain of horse in the expedition
against the Scots, was soon raised to the rank of major and, in
1642, commanded the garrison of Farnham castle in Surrey. The
royalists took him prisoner soon afterwards, and he only escaped
hanging by a jest of the gallant Denham, who declared that, as
long as Wither lived, he, Denham, could not be accounted the
worst poet in England. Wither survived the jest to become major-
general of all Cromwell's horse and foot in the county of Surrey.
At the restoration, he lost the considerable fortune which he had
made from royalist sequestrations and, in 1660, was imprisoned in
Newgate for three years. Four years after his release, he died
(2 May 1667), and was buried in the Savoy church in the
Strand.
Such were the events of his second period. The poetry of that
period was not pastoral, and is not so well known as his pastoral
It is, however, intensely characteristic, and deserves to
survive not only for its continual quaintness but for its occasional
beauty: Haleluiah or Britain's Second Remembrancer is the
unpromising title, and stern puritan faith is the unpromising
subject. But the poems, composed in a three-fold volume, are
instinct with his personality and vigorous charm. Hymns Oc-
casional, Hymns Temporary, Hymns Personall are the names
of the three parts; they are written 'that all Persons, according
to their Degrees and qualities, may at all times. . . be remembred
to praise GOD; and to be mindful of their duties. There is no
occasion too homely to be improved; and each hymn is prefaced
by a short note of explanation as to the exact circumstances under
which it should be sung. Such poems as A Rocking Hymn
(exquisite in the simplicity of its beauty) show Wither at his best.
verse.


## p. 157 (#179) ############################################

William Browne
157
They have a clear sincerity; and they express a joy in the possi-
bilities of life which is remarkable and very different from what
is usually understood by the puritan spirit. They are written in
various metres, with the spontaneous ease which was part of Wither's
very being, and in which he resembles his friend William Browne.
William Browne also shared Wither's joy in life, though the
circumstances of his career formed a strong antithesis to those of his
friend's stormy life. For Browne seems to have lived as peacefully
and gracefully as he wrote. He was born at Tavistock not later
than 1591 of a good Devon family. About 1603, he went from
the grammar school of Tavistock to Exeter college, Oxford, and,
leaving the university without taking a degree, he came to
Clifford's inn and then settled at the Inner Temple (November
1611). Little is known of his life, which was without great inci-
dent. Browne was twice married. Of his first wife, no record
remains. In 1628, he married Tymothy Eversfield, daughter of Sir
Thomas Eversfield, after a courtship of some thirteen years. He
owed his position chiefly to the patronage of the Herberts and to
the fact that he coached Robert Dormer, the future earl of
Carnarvon. He died about the year 1645.
Browne's first printed poem, like that of Wither and of Drum-
mond, was concerned with the death of prince Henry. It appeared
in 1613, with an elegy by Christopher Brooke. In the same year was
published the first book of Britannia's Pastorals, his longest and
most famous work. It tells the story of the loves of Marina and
Redmond and Celand. The story is elusive and unimportant,
and serves chiefly as a means of singing the praises of England
and of his own Devon. The charm of the poem lies in its sim-
plicity of thought and diction. No rural incident is too trivial to
be recorded, and, though this triviality, especially in metaphor,
is sometimes a little far-fetched, the metaphors are often most
effective, and give an atmosphere of delicacy which is real and
refreshing. For simple beauty, there are few passages to equal
that which describes how Marina, trapped in a cave, was fed on
strawberries and cherries by a robin redbreast; and it is im-
possible to forget the two little brothers who were scared by the
angry bull, or the little lad who,
gotten new
to play his part amongst a skilful crew
of choice musicians,
was obliged to emphasise his presence by a loud and sudden noise.


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158
The Successors of Spenser
His poems show a capacity for warm affection; and he had many
friends among the many poets of his day. With Drayton, Wither,
Christopher Brooke, Davies, Ben Jonson, he was on terms of
intimacy; and the fact that they were his friends did not prevent
him from celebrating in verse their achievements, for which he had
great and discerning admiration. But Spenser was his master, as
he is proud to avow, and, in a less degree, Sidney. That is to say,
in the great view of life which is expressed in Spenser's poetry, the
homeliest affairs of everyday existence have their place as surely
as the heights of life's imagined possibilities ; and Browne was
strengthened in his love of these everyday affairs by Spenser's
treatment of them. If the nature of influence be pressed too
closely, a false conception is quickly produced. For the influence
lies in the time in which the men lived: the time inspired each
man according to his capacity, though the smaller men were
strengthened by the utterance of the bigger man.
Browne ends the first song of the second book of Britannia's
Pastorals with a eulogy of Spenser. He never missed an occasion
for giving voice to his love and admiration of Spenser, but this is
the most notable passage, and it seems to imply that a plan for
erecting a monument in honour of Spenser was thwarted by
'suborn'd, curs’d Avarice. This slight wrought upon Browne to
compo: e lines almost unrecognisably fierce in denunciation of 'that
gulf-devouring offspring of a devil'— my busied pen Shall jerk
to death this infamy of men. ' But he returns at the beginning
of the second song to his gentle vein, and passes in review the
English poets. In his praises of them, he shows his discernment.
He writes of 'all-loved’ Drayton, “a genuine note of all the
nymphish trains began to tune'; of Ben Jonson, ‘One so
judicious, so well knowing and A man whose least worth is to
understand'; of 'well-languag'd' Daniel; and of Brooke, 'whose
polish'd lines Are fittest to accomplish high designs. ”
For Browne was a scholar and could discriminate. He was
interested in old MSS and printed a poem of Occleve with his
Shepherd's Pipe (1614); ‘as this shall please,' he wrote, “I may be
drawn to publish the rest of his works. ' However, it did not please,
and others of Occleve's works remained in Browne's possession.
This trait probably accounts for the small care he took about the
publishing of his own works. The first book of Britannia's
Pastorals was published, as has been said, in 1613, the second in
1616, and the two were reissued together in 1625; but the third
book remained during his lifetime in manuscript, and was not
6


## p. 159 (#181) ############################################

Fulke Greville
159
published till 1852. The same is true of the Inner Temple Masque
which was performed on 13 January 1614/15, and which was not
printed till 1772, from a manuscript in the library of Emmanuel
college, Cambridge.
Fulke Greville, lord Brooke, belonged to an elder generation
than that of the other poets in this chapter, and was an exact
contemporary of Sir Philip Sidney, whose life he wrote. Unlike
Browne or Drummond, he was not primarily a poet; he belonged
rather to the older school of men, who, like Castiglione's courtier,
cultivated the germ of poetry as a faculty which should belong to
every properly constituted man. Wither was a poet masquerading
as a man of arms. His soldierly achievements cannot be taken
with perfect seriousness. Fulke Greville, primarily, was a states-
man and man of affairs. In 1598, he became treasurer of the
navy and, in 1614, chancellor of the exchequer. Born at Beau-
champ court, Warwickshire, in 1554, Fulke Greville entered
Shrewsbury school on the very same day as Philip Sidney, 17
October 1564, and, from Shrewsbury, he went to Jesus college,
Cambridge, four years later. With Sidney, he came to the court
in 1577, and travelled to Heidelberg with him in the same year.
Like Sidney, he was rapidly taken into the queen's favour, and
him, too, the queen forbade to go far from her presence. The
secretaryship to the principality of Wales was given him before the
age of thirty.
Fulké Greville was a great patron of letters. Camden was
appointed Clarencieux through his influence. He freed John
Speed's 'hand from the daily employment of a manual trade. '
He endowed a history chair at Cambridge into which he put the
renowned Dorislaus of Holland; Samuel Daniel, Henry Lok, John
Davies, William D'Avenant were glad to acknowledge their in-
debtedness to him.
Except for an elegy on Sidney, which appeared in the miscellany
The Phoenix Nest (1593), two poems in the first edition of
Englands Helicon (1600) and the tragedy of Mustapha (1609),
the work of lord Brooke remained unpublished during his life-
time. In 1633, five years after his death, appeared a volume
containing, as the title-page recounts, Certaine learned and
elegant workes written in his Youth and familiar exercise with
Sir Philip Sidney. They include A Treatise of Humane Learn-
ing, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, A Treatie of
Warres, his tragedies Mustapha and Alaham and a set of poems


## p. 160 (#182) ############################################

160
The Successors of Spenser
which, according to the fashion of the time, are named sonnets,
called Caelica'. In 1652, appeared his life of Sir Philip Sidney,
and, in 1670, the Remains of Sir Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke,
being poems of Monarchy and Religion, never before printed.
The reason which prevented the publication of his poems is,
probably, the same as that which restrained him from publishing
his life of Sidney and from writing his history of queen Elizabeth.
With the exception of some of the poems in Caelica, they deal
with subjects of statecraft which might have been easily mis-
interpreted by enemies. As Elizabeth grew old, the question of
her successor and of the best form of government in general
for the country troubled all the finest minds in England. Her
death was not only a personal grief to such men as Greville and
Ralegh; it foreshadowed to them the eventual death of monarchy.
“Their author,' writes Charles Lamb of his two tragedies, ‘has
strangely contrived to make passion, character and interest, of
the highest order subservient to the expression of state dogmas. '
Fulke Greville was forty-nine years old when the queen died. To
his feeling for her he gives beautiful expression in his digression
in the life of Sidney in which he recounts the features of her reign
and policy, and this feeling merged into his conception of the place
which, to his thinking, she filled admirably, that is to say, into his
conception of monarchy. This is why, through the cold, intellec-
tual force of his treatment and reasoning, there shines the living
glow of personal passion. Nor is it necessary to search for the
original of Caelica; internal evidence strongly points to the fact
that these poems afford one more proof of the power of Elizabeth. .
Most of the sonnets' in Caclica, and the whole of the poems
Of Humane Learning, Of Fame and Honour, Of Warres and
on Monarchy and Religion are written in a six-lined stanza,
riming ababcc. The versification of the tragedies is of peculiar
interest, for, although the choruses, for the most part, are written
in riming couplets, in the speeches great care has been taken to
obtain the effect of the couplet without its monotony. Consecu-
tive couplets rarely occur : most speeches of any length conclude
with a couplet: there are many instances of unriming lines, and
many rimes run in quatrains abab.
Brooke's death was sudden and tragic. He was murdered in
1628 by his servant Haywood, who thought he had been omitted
from his master's will. He wrote the epitaph which was cut on
his tombstone. It amply epitomises his life: “Fulke Grevil-
i See vol. ui of the present work, p. 267.


## p.
161 (#183) ############################################

Sir John Davies
161
Servant to Queene Elizabeth—Councellor to King James-and
Frend to Sir Philip Sydney. Trophaeum Peccati. '
Sir John Davies (not to be confused with John Davies of
Hereford) was a man of the same pattern, though without lord
Brooke's memory of the spacious days' and without his deep
austerity. He, too, was a man of affairs, and rose to a high
position in the state. His life, however, had not the same great
beginning, and his was no smooth passage to fame. Born in 1569,
at Tisbury in Wiltshire, he went to Winchester and Oxford (partly,
it appears, resident at New college, partly at Queen's college),
and, like the majority of young men of the time, came, in 1587, to
study law in London. But he quarrelled with the friend to whom
he had dedicated his Orchestra, Richard Martin, and, entering the
hall, armed with a dagger, he broke his cudgel over Martin's head,
who was eating his dinner at the barristers' table. In consequence
of this outrage on the benchers, he was disbarred. For an orphan,
with his way to make, the calamity was heavy. He returned to
Oxford in 1598, three years after he had been called, and wrote
his great poem Nosce Teipsum. Lord Mountjoy, afterwards earl
of Devonshire, approved of it so highly that he advised Davies to
publish it, with a dedicatory poem to the queen. This, Davies
was not slow to do. The poem appeared the year after his ex-
pulsion from the bar, and added largely to his growing reputation
as a poet. The Hymns to Astroea appeared in the same
year, and Davies's services were in request to write words for
‘entertainments' offered to her majesty. A Dialogue between a
Gentleman Usher and a Poet, A contention betwixt a Wife, a
Widdow and a Maide and A Lottery, are the names of those that
are extant. A Lottery gained the queen's acknowledgment,
and, through the influence of lord Ellesmere, Davies, after a formal
apology to the benchers and to Richard Martin, was reinstated at
the bar in 1601. His career now began. He was among those
who went with lord Hunsdon to escort king James to the English
throne, and James was sufficiently impressed with him to appoint
him solicitor-general for Ireland, under lord Mountjoy, then lord
deputy. In December 1603, on his arrival in Dublin, he was
knighted, and, some years later, he married the daughter of lord
Audley. One of his children was the famous countess of Hunting-
don. His work in Ireland, where he remained until 1619, was
distinguished, and how deeply he was interested in Irish affairs may
be gathered from his Discourse of the true reasons why Ireland
>
E. L, IV.
CH. IX
11


## p. 162 (#184) ############################################

162
The Successors of Spenser
has never been intirely subdued till the beginning of His Majesty's
reign. In 1619, he resumed his seat in the House of Commons
as member for Newcastle under Lyme, to which he had been
elected in 1614, and, just before he could assume the office of chief
justice, to which he had been appointed in 1626, he died suddenly
of an apoplexy.
Orchestra or a Poeme on Dauncing was written before June
1594, although it was not published until 1596. The poem is in
the form of a dialogue between Penelope and one of her suitors,
and consists of 131 stanzas of seven lines, each riming ababbcc.
In the dedicatory sonnet to ‘his very friend MA. Richard Martin,'
which, in spite of the reconciliation, was omitted from the edition
of 1622, Davies describes the poem as 'this suddaine, rash half-
capreol of my wit,' and reminds Martin how it was written in
fifteen days. The fact is worthy of attention because it shows the
writer's ability and mastery over his material. The poem bears
no sign of haste in the making. Gallant and gay, it flows with
transparent clearness to its conclusion, and the verse has the happy
ease which marks all the work of Davies, and makes it comparable
with the music of Mozart.
His next work Nosce Teipsum possesses the same fluidity of
thought and diction, which is the more remarkable as the poem is
deeply philosophical. The sub-title explains the subject : 'This
oracle expounded in two elegies. 1. Of Humane knowledge.
2. Of the Soule of Man and the immortalitie thereof. ' The first
edition was published in 1599, the second, 'newly corrected and
amended,' in 1602, the third in 1608, and, of course, the poem was
included in the collected edition which Davies himself made of his
poems in 1622.
Wouldst thou be crowned the Monarch of a little world?
command thyself,' wrote Francis Quarles, who was certainly well-
acquainted with Nosce Teipsum, in the second century of his
Enchiridion, and that sentence gives the gist of the first part of
the poem on Humane Knowledge. Davies then passes on to
examine the nature of the soul, its attributes and its connection
with the body; and, having defined with exactness what he means
by the soul, proceeds to prove its immortality by means of argu-
ments for and against his proposition. Proof in such a matter is not
possible; but a personal answer to the great question, so sincerely
thought and so lucidly expressed as is this answer of Davies, will
always have its value. Nor is Nosce Teipsum a treatise which
ingenuity has fashioned into verse and which more properly would


## p. 163 (#185) ############################################

Sir Henry Wotton
163
be expressed in plain prose. Davies does not, as it were, embroider
his theme with verse, but uses verse, and its beauties of line and
metaphor, to make his meaning more clear, and, thereby, gallantly
justifies the employment of his medium. This mastery of his is
enviously complete ; but, perhaps, it is most conspicuous in the
Hymns to Astroea which were first published in 1599. As the
title-page announces, they are written ‘in Acrosticke verse. ' They
are twenty-six in number: each poem is of three stanzas (two of
five lines, one of six lines), and each line begins with a different
letter of the name Elizabetha Regina. Yet, in spite of this
fantastic formality, not a line is forced, and one or two of the
poems, notably hymn v, To the Lark
Earley, cheerfull, mounting Larke,
Light's gentle usher, Morning's clark,
are exquisite songs.
.
Sir Henry Wotton owes his literary fame to one poem of
memorable beauty, to his friendship with Sir Edward Dyer and
John Donne, and to the twofold fact that an elegy on his death was
composed by Abraham Cowley and that his life was written by his
illustrious fellow-angler, Izaak Walton. The author of 'You meaner
beauties of the night' deserves immortality, though many authors
of songs as beautiful remain unknown. He was born at Boughton
hall, in the parish of Boughton Malherbe, Kent, in 1568, and was
educated at Winchester and New college, which he entered on
5 June 1584. His father's death left him in a position to travel,
of which he availed himself to the full. He visited Linz, Vienna,
Naples, Venice, Florence, and stayed with the scholar Casaubon
at Geneva. Few provosts have had a career so chequered and
adventurous as Sir Henry Wotton. For he sent news to the
earl of Essex from abroad, and, being at home in the capacity of
secretary to Essex at the time of his patron’s disaster, was obliged
to flee the country. He returned to Florence, and duke Ferdinand,
hearing of a plot to assassinate king James of Scotland, sent
him to warn the king. Wotton, taking up the name and language,'
as Walton recounts, of an Italian, travelled to Scotland from
Florence by way of Norway, and arrived, as Octavio Baldi, at
Stirling, where king James was. Three months he stayed at the
court, disguised as Baldi, and the king alone knew the secret of his
identity. Then he returned to Italy. When king James ascended
the throne of England, Wotton was received into favour. He was
three times sent as ambassador to Venice and, eventually, was
11-2


## p. 164 (#186) ############################################

164 The Successors of Spenser
made provost of Eton--a post which he retained until his death
in 1639.
Sufficient of his poems have survived to make some wish that
the number were less scanty. His play Tancredo and, doubtless,
many poems are lost. His writings were collected and published
in 1651 under the title Reliquiae Wottonianae. His character is
typical of the days in which he lived. The power to write verse
was considered an indispensable attribute of a courtier. Sir
Edward Dyer, the earl of Essex and his great rival, Sir Walter
Ralegh, afford eminent examples, and there are many more whose
names are known by a song or two more generally than by
other weightier though less important achievements. A gradual
and indefinable change, however, was evolving; and poetry,
leaving the court and the circle of those in authority, took, as it
were, its own place in the country, and that place seems at first to
have been the church. The two brothers Giles and Phineas Fletcher
head the line of poets who were divines of the English church.
Giles Fletcher, the younger brother, was born in London about
1588, and went from Westminster school to Trinity college,
Cambridge, in the spring of the year 1603. In 1618, he became
reader in Greek, and, having taken holy orders, was appointed vicar
of Alderton in Suffolk, where he died in 1623. Although he was
some six years younger than his brother, his poem Christs Victorie,
and Triumph in Heaven, and Earth, over and after death was
published many years before his brother's poem The Purple Island,
namely, in 1610, by C. Legge at Cambridge. Christs Victorie and
Triumph is his principal work, but he also wrote a Canto upon the
Death of Eliza, an Elegy upon Prince Henry's Death and a short
poem in riming couplets, to which Boas has given the name A De-
scription of Encolpius Christs Victorie, written in 265 eight-lined
stanzas (riming ababbocc) is divided into four parts. In the first
part, he describes Christ's victory in Heaven through the inter-
cession of Mercy against the indictment of man by Justice; in
the second, His victory on earth where He overcomes Satan, who,
in the guise of a reverend palmer, tempts Him to Desperation, to
Presumption and to Vainglory ; in the third, he describes Christ's
triumph over death, 'in generall by his joy to undergo it . . . by his
passion itself,' and the particular effects of the triumph throughout
the universe; and, in the last part, Christ's triumph after death
is narrated, as manifested in the resurrection and the effects of the
resurrection on all living things. There is no doubt that, as a


## p. 165 (#187) ############################################

The Fletchers
165
whole, the poem is hampered by the very quality which gave it
birth-the author's devoutness. He is unable to weave his own
fancy and the accepted traditions into a composite pattern ; and
the effort to make his verse worthy of its subject often produces
the effect of constraint or of exaggeration. There are, however,
many passages of individual beauty, such as the description of
Mercy, and some of great dramatic power, notably the passage in
which the effect of Christ's triumph upon Judas is told. The
vigour of his phrase and the loftiness of his aim combine to make
him a worthy link in the chain which connects his great master and
his great successor-Spenser and Milton.
His elder brother, Phineas Fletcher, was born in 1582, and
went from Eton to King's college, Cambridge, in the Commons
book of which college his name first appears in 1600. A contribu-
tion of his appeared in Sorrowes Joy, a poetical miscellany,
compiled at the university in 1603, in which his younger brother's
Canto upon Eliza gained a place and which mourned Elizabeth's
death at the same time as it welcomed the arrival of king James.
The resemblance in the lives of the brothers is as marked as the
resemblance in their work. The chief legacy which their father
left them was a good education. Both lived at Cambridge for
some years until Giles Fletcher became vicar of Alderton in
Suffolk, and Phineas Fletcher, after being for five years chaplain
to Sir Henry Willoughby, became rector of Hilgay in Norfolk, in
1621, two years before his brother's death in 1623. Phineas
Fletcher wrote far more than Giles, and was possessed of a light
manner as well as of the more deeply serious manner which
characterises the extant work of his brother. Brittain's Ida,
first published in 1628, Sicelides and Piscatorie Eclogues are
the most notable examples of this lighter manner. Brittain's
Ida is a pretty, amatory poem in six cantos on the subject of
Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis. The stanzas are of eight lines
and rime ababbccc. The long success of the publisher's ruse
which attributed the poem to Spenser and which remained un-
discovered until Grosart proved the authorship shows how nicely
Fletcher hit the manner of Spenser. Sicelides, a piscatory,
is a fisher-play of spirited wit and fancy, which was acted
at King's college, Cambridge on 13 March 1614/15, and printed,
also without the author's consent, in 1631. No grave divine,
such as Fletcher had then become, would have been pleased
1 See also Boas's preface to poetical works of Giles and Phineas Fletcher, vol. II,
Cambridge, 1909.
1


## p. 166 (#188) ############################################

166
The Successors of Spenser
to own offspring so flippant and indecorous as these works of his
youth. His immense poem The Purple Island, as well-known as
it is little read, he did not, however, thus view askance. Its
scope is colossal, for the purple island is the little isle of man, a
country which, be it observed, Davies, Wither and Drummond had
each in his own way explored. For the secret realm of a man's
own nature had, for these poets, as great an attraction as unknown
lands had for the previous generation of pioneers in exploration.
Though the intention is interesting, the setting—the daily conver-
sations of shepherds—is laboured, and the allegory troublesome
to follow. He does not aid his minute description of the body
and its functions by his continual geographical analogies ; indeed,
many passages would be completely meaningless without his own
explanatory notes. But his enthusiasm for the delicate mechanism
of the body is none the less remarkable that his expression of it is
often amusing. After a detailed description of man's anatomy, he
turns his attention to qualities of man's mind, and passes in
review all the virtues and vices. Here, in small allegorical
pictures, he is more successful ; many of them are happy in idea
and beautiful in execution, especially his pictures of ignorance, of
Andreos or fortitude, of Androphilus or gentleness.
His two best poems are The Apollyonists and Elisa, an Elegie.
The Locusts or Apollyonists was published in 1627 with a poem
Locustae on the same subject, in Latin hexameters, and is
written in five cantos of forty stanzas each. The stanza is of
nine lines, riming abababccc, and affords another variant of the
Spenserian stanza from the seven-lined stanza, riming ababbcc in
the Elegy and ababccc in The Purple Island. In this poem,
he uses the fall of Lucifer as a device to explain the strength of
the church of Rome, whose machinations are made to culminate
in the Gunpowder plot. He writes with the bitterness that might
be expected from an English clergyman of the time; but this
bitterness narrows the scope of the poem to an expression of
party-hatred—a function ill-suited to poetry. Many lines, how-
ever, especially at the outset, where he deals with evil in general,
are vigorous, and, at times, so forcible and spacious as to justify
the epithet Miltonic. Elisa is an elegy, published in the 1633
quarto, upon the death of Sir Antony Irby, composed, as its
separate title-page announces, at the request, and for a monument,
of his surviving lady. The poem is in two parts of fifty stanzas
each, and maintains a high level of sustained feeling. It shows
Phineas Fletcher at his simplest and at his best. He creates with
,


## p. 167 (#189) ############################################

a
The Fletchers
167
striking power the illusion of reality in a dialogue between the
dying husband and his wife, which is singularly original and
reaches its climax of pathetic beauty in the last eighteen stanzas
of the first part, in which he begs her gladly to continue with the
burden of life for the sake of their children-'this little nation to
thy care commend them. '
Both the Fletchers were steeped in Spenser's poetry, and
carried on the Spenserian tradition. In their work is to be found
Spenser's diffuseness, his use of allegory, many variants of his
stanza and the echo, often a beautiful echo, of his music. More-
over, Milton knew the work of the Fletchers as intimately as he,
or the Fletchers, knew the work of Spenser. And so one of the
prettiest and most intricate problems that is to be found in litera-
ture arises on the question of what is known as influence. The
best example of the affinity between the work of Milton and the
work of Phineas Fletcher is to be found in a comparison between
the way in which Milton treats that stock episode of the miracle
play, the fall of Lucifer, and the way in which Fletcher treats it.
In The Apollyonists, the fall of Lucifer is a prelude to an onslaught
upon the Jesuits : the great opening is narrowed to the confines
of religious hatred. But the sympathy which Milton could not
but feel for the rebel transformed the figure of Satan from a fine
conception to one of immortal grandeur. Milton humanised
the devil, Fletcher diabolised the priest. Their meeting-point is
found in Fletcher's lines
To be in heaven the second hé disdaines :
So now the first in hell and flames he raignes,
Crown'd once with joy and light: crown'd now with fire and paines.
and in the Miltonic
Better to reign in hell then serve in Heav'n,


## p. 168 (#190) ############################################

CHAPTER X
MICHAEL DRAYTON
>
THE poet of whom this chapter treats was much admired
by his contemporaries. The title golden-mouthed,' first given
him by Fitzgeffry, clung to him, and Meres praises him for the
purity and preciousness of his style and phrase. ' After more than
a century of neglect, he was reprinted and read in the middle of
the eighteenth century; but, though he again acquired some vogue
in the Elizabethan revival of the early part of the nineteenth
century, it is only in recent years that his poetry has begun to
receive the recognition it deserves.
Michael Drayton, as we learn from the portrait by William
Hole which forms the frontispiece to the Poems of 1619, was
born at Hartshill, in the county of Warwick, in 1563. He died,
probably in London, near the end of 1631. Born within a year
before Shakespeare, and dying when Milton was already twenty-
three, he worked hard at poetry during nearly sixty years of his
long life, and was successful in keeping in touch with the poetical
progress of a crowded and swiftly-moving period. His earliest
published work tastes of Tottel's Miscellany: before he dies, he
suggests Carew and Suckling, and even anticipates Dryden. This
quality of forming, as it were, a map or mirror of his age gives him
a special interest to the student of poetry, which is quite distinct
from his peculiar merits as a poet.
Drayton himself has left us, besides other scraps of autobio-
graphy scattered among his works, an account of the genesis of
the great passion of his life. His family appears to have been of
the same grade as Shakespeare's, that of well-to-do tradespeople> ;
:
1 The advance in Drayton's just reputation is brought into prominence by Elton, O. :
Michael Drayton: A Critical Study (1895 and 1905). No modern student of Drayton
can escape his obligations to this scholarly and stimulating work.
? Reproduced, Elton (1905), p. 107. All subsequent references are to this edition.
For some details and a pedigree see Elton, pp. 244.


## p. 169 (#191) ############################################

Drayton's Boyhood
169
and, in early boyhood, Michael Drayton, one of a large family,
was taken to be page, or something of the kind—at any rate, to
occupy a position of confidence and intimacy-in the family of
Sir Henry Goodere of Powlsworth (now Polesworth), on the river
Ancor, not far from Tamworth. His gratitude to Sir Henry
Goodere, “the first cherisher of his muse,' he expressed more than
once : in the dedications of the Heroicall Epistles (1597) of queen
Isabel to king Richard II, of lady Jane Grey to lord Guilford
Dudley and of queen Margaret to the duke of Suffolk. And,
in his sixty-fourth year, Drayton looked back and gave his friend
Henry Reynolds, in a letter in verse, an account of his education
at Polesworth, and the birth in him of the desire to be a poet.
For from my cradle, (you must know that) I,
Was still inclin'd to noble Poesie,
And when that once Pueriles I had read,
And newly had my Cato construed,
In my small selfe I greatly marveiļd then,
Amonst all other, what strange kinde of men
These Poets were; And pleased with the name,
To my milde Tutor merrily I came,
(For I was then a proper goodly page,
Much like a Pigmy, scarse ten yeares of age)
Clasping my slender armes about his thigh.
O my deare master! cannot you (quoth I)
Make me a Poet, doe it if you can,
And you shall see, Ile quickly bee a man,
Who me thus answered smiling, boy quoth he,
If you'le not play the wag, but I may see
You ply your learning, I will shortly read
Some Poets to you; Phoebus be my speed,
Too't hard went I, when shortly he began,
And first read to me honest Mantuan,
Then Virgils Eglogues, being entred thus,
Me thought I straight had mounted Pegasus,
And in his full Careere could make him stop,
And bound upon Parnassus" by-clift top.
I scornd your ballet then though it were done
And had for Finis, William Eldertoni.
The account forms an interesting comment on Drayton's muse,
which was always sensitive to the influence of other poets, and was
largely inspired from without.
However he may have 'scornd your ballet' and William
Elderton, there was another influence, and one less pedantic than
Mantuan or Vergil, at work upon him during those boyish years
at Polesworth. In 1619, when dedicating his Odes to Donne's
1 Text from Brett, pp. 108—9. Elderton (ob. 1592 ? ) was a ballad-writer.


## p. 170 (#192) ############################################

170
Michael Drayton
6
friend, Sir Henry Goodere the younger, he recalled to the memory
of his old playmate
John Hewes his lyre
Which oft at Powlsworth by the fire
Hath made us gravely merry.
John Hewes, presumably, was the minstrel attached to the Goodere
household, and, from his name, presumably also Welsh; and it has
been suggested that on Hewes's lips the boy may have heard
‘those rough dactyls of the old folk-ballad Agincourt, Agincourt,
which gallop through Drayton's own monumental war-chant,' the
Ballad of Agincourt, dedicated ‘To the Cambro-Britans and their
Harpe.
It is not known whether Drayton went to a university. Our
first news of him is that in February 1591 he was in London.
The sixth eclogue in the 1606 edition of his Idea, the Shepheard's
Garland, contains a passage which, perhaps, may obscurely hint
at some irregularity of life after he had left his native county; but
nothing can be built upon it, and any supposition of debauchery
would be contrary to other evidence of Drayton's character
On 1 February 1591, his earliest extant work was entered
at Stationers' Hall; and the dedication to the lady Jane Devereux
of Merivale, sister-in-law of the earl of Essex, is dated the tenth of
the same month. How Drayton came to enjoy the patronage of
this lady is not known. The Harmonie of the Church, as has
been said above, has a flavour of Tottels Miscellany. The author,
clearly, was well read in his Old Testament and Apocrypha ; for
the matter of his book is the versification of nineteen prayers
and
songs of thanksgiving from these sources, including The Song
of Songs. The song of Moses, from the thirty-second chapter of
Deuteronomy, the song of Deborah and Barak from Judges, the
prayer and song of Judith and the joyful thanksgiving of the
faithful from the twelfth chapter of Isaiah are among the passages
paraphrased. There is nothing in all this painstaking 'prentice
work that foreshadows the poet who was to be; and it is hard
to believe that this was really the best that Drayton could do
at the age of twenty-eight. Though quatrains and stanzas of six
decasyllabic lines occur, the principal metre is that of the old
fourteeners,' or twelves and fourteeners mixed, common in the
earlier Elizabethan poetry. Drayton uses it without spirit or
1 By Elton, p. 8.
2 See Meres, Palladis Tamia; Fuller, Worthies; and The Returne from Parnassus,
&ct 1, 8c. 2.


## p. 171 (#193) ############################################

The Harmonie of the Church
171
a
novelty, and it may not be unfair to regard The Harmonie of the
Church as intended merely to acquire for the author a very
respectable introduction to the public of his day. The statement,
long current, that the book was confiscated in the year of its
publication has been proved erroneous! Drayton reissued the
work in 1610 under the title, A Heavenly Harmonie of Spirituall
Songes.
For something over two years, Drayton was silent. Then, in
April 1593, there was entered at Stationers' Hall a book which
showed a different influence from that revealed in The Harmonie
of the Church, and one which proved its author's title to the name
of poet. Throughout his life, Drayton maintained a fervent
admiration for Spenser, and Spenser was the model whom he
followed in his second publication. In 1579, the voice of what
was then the new poetry had spoken for the first time in Spenser's
Shepheards Calender. In 1593, Drayton's Idea, the Shepheard's
Garland, Fashioned in nine Eglogs. Rowlands Sacrifice to the
Nine Muses, carried on the same form, though not entirely with
the same end in view. In 1619, when he issued a third edition of
Idea under a new title (in the volume entitled Poems, including
The Barons Warres, England's Heroicall Epistles, Idea, Odes. . .
Pastorals, Contayning Eglogues, etc. ), Drayton prefixed to it a
brief discourse on pastoral in general, which contains this character-
istically ungrammatical sentence:
The subject of Pastorals, as the language of it ought to be poor, silly, and
of the coarsest woof in appearance; nevertheless, the most high, and most
noble matters of the world may be shadowed in them, and for certain some-
times are.
Notably so, of course, in Spenser's Shepheards Calender. But
Drayton, much as he owes to his great forerunner's work, shows
two points of difference. His language is not 'poor, silly, and
of the coarsest woof. ' It almost entirely avoids the archaisms in
which Spenser rejoiced, and it rises, when occasion demands, to
a nobility which makes these eclogues one of his finest achieve-
ments. Secondly, he almost entirely discards the tradition which,
starting in England, perhaps, from the study of Mantuan, had
forcibly affected all the writers of pastoral from Googe to Watson,
and was to reappear in Lycidas.