Virginius
de-
layed too long and now regrets that he cannot marry?
layed too long and now regrets that he cannot marry?
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v04
Thus,
vaine glory is any excessive pride or delight which we take in things unneces-
sary; much of the nature is it of ambition but it is not so dangerous or
conversant about so great matters as ambition. It is (as I may call it) the
froth and seething up of ambition.
This play of thought and fancy on familiar ideas, already notice-
able in The Anatomie of Absurditie, illustrates a habit of mind
made familiar to us by Bacon and his school.
But Nashe was not destined to create the essay. He had,
indeed, the sympathy with daily life, the knowledge of character,
and the familiarity with classical wisdom necessary to cultivate
this genre. But he had also to earn his bread and pay his debts.
He could not distil his philosophy into a volume of detached
counsels and reflections, which might slowly win its way. So
he continued to squander his wit, learning and experience in
pamphlets 'botched up and compyled' on the sensations of the
moment.
Thus, in his next production, reflections on Turkey, Iceland,
physiognomy, consumption and Camden hurtle one another in a
counterblast to dream-superstitions. Europe, at this moment,
was agitated with the belief that the devil was regaining his
control over man. His handiwork was being discovered every-
where; old women were witches, cats were spirits or transfigured
men, dreams were messages from hell. The report of a gentleman,
who died after experiencing seven fantastic visions, had just re-
awakened Englishmen's alarm at the unseen perils of sleep and
darkness. Nashe seized this opportunity to compose the Terrors
of the Night. At this time, demonology belonged to the realms
of theological disquisition. Even R. Scot had not escaped the
academic atmosphere, and G. Gifford" and H. Holland” had
recently delivered themselves of treatises unutterably scholastic.
It is a striking illustration of the vitality of popular literature
that Nashe discovered how to burst the bubble of these super-
stitions by sound common sense and sympathetic insight into
human nature. He claims that one thought of faith will put
to flight all the powers of evil, and answers with a volley of
ridicule the dogma of St Chrysostom that the devil can multiply
himself indefinitely. He quotes history to prove that dreams
seldom or never come true unless they are direct intimations from
1 Discourse of the subtile Practises of Devilles, 1587.
? A Treatise against Witchcraft, 1590.
## p. 326 (#348) ############################################
326 London and Popular Literature
6
a
6
God; and he refutes the belief in astrologers from his own experi-
ence of their careers. Most of them, he declares, began as
apothecaries' apprentices and dogleeches, who used to impose on
rustics with ointments and syrups made of toasted cheese and
candle ends. By and bye, some needy gallant hears of their
practices and introduces them to a nobleman on condition of
sharing the profits. Thus, they make their way through the
world, sometimes rising by their counterfeit art to the position of
privy councillor. He disposes of the mystery of dreams, explain-
ing them as after-effects of the day's activity ; 'echoes of our con-
ceipts,' often coloured by sensations felt in sleep, so that the sound
of a dog's bark suggests the 'complaint of damned ghosts' in hell,
and he that is spiced wyth the gowte or the dropsie' dreams of
fetters and manacles. This theory had already been outlined by
Scot', but Nashe surpasses the older controversialist when he
describes the moral terrors of the night. Not only does a guilty
conscience breed 'superstitions as good as an hundred furies, but
the sorrows and anxieties of life have special power, as Bullein
had pointed out? , in the loneliness and gloom of sleep-time.
But Nashe was never again to approach so near the high level
of a moralist. Some more skirmishing took place between him
and Gabriel Harvey in the autumn of 1593 and in 1594%. And
then, in 1596, he produced Have with you to Saffron-Walden, or,
Gabriell Harveys Hunt is up.
This piece of invective is unique in English literature, and it
exhausts the literary resources of the age. To multiply his
ridicule and give scope to his digressions, he borrowed from
comedy and cast the lampoon into the form of a tetralogue, in
which four speakers contribute to criticise Harvey's style and to
make merry over his humble origin. Then ensues a burlesque
biography of the doctor. His conception and birth are narrated
in the manner of Rabelais, and his academic character is travestied
on the model of Pedantius * Nashe creates a truly infernal
picture of the university scholar, absorbed in his own spite:
In the deadest season that might bee, hee lying in the ragingest furie of
the last plague, when there dyde above 1600 a week in London, ink-squitter-
ing and printing against me at Wolfes in Powles churchyard.
1 Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, Bk. x.
? Bulwarke of Defence : Booke of Compoundes, fol. liiij.
3 Ante, vol. in, ch. XVII, bibl. , p. 546.
* See ed. Moore Smith (Louvain, 1905) and post, vol. v, the chapter on Academic
Plays.
## p. 327 (#349) ############################################
Lenten Stuffe
327
Neither Nashe nor anyone else expected such accusations to
be taken seriously. But the tract deserves a place in permanent
literature. It is a saturnalia of invective such as only the age
could produce. Nor must we regard this intellect and ingenuity
as altogether wasted in a barren attempt to defame a fellow-
creature. The impeachment was composed for a critical audience,
and, in the effort to attain rhetorical effect, the art of expression
was perceptibly enlarged. Among other features, there is a full-
length portrait of Harvey, executed with a thoroughness of detail
which Mme de Scudéry might have envied, and the character of
an intelligencer which the Overbury collection never surpassed.
Nashe passed through two years of adversity, and then
reappeared in 1599 with Lenten Stuffe. This pamphlet is an
ambitious attempt to 'wring juice out of a flint’: to heighten his
humour by extracting it from unproductive material, and he
succeeds in uniting many of the lighter types of prose literature
in a single pamphlet. He begins by introducing a personal note
telling the public of his literary difficulties and financial em-
barrassments. These led him to leave London. In return for the
hospitality which he enjoyed at Yarmouth, he recounts the history
of that town (drawn from Camden) in a fine spirit of pageantry,
trumpeting its origin and development 'as I have scrapped out of
worm-eaten Parchments. He then treats his readers to a speci-
men of burlesque encomium, such as the Romans, Italians and
especially the German anti-Grobianists, had made popular",
working up an eulogy on the herring fisheries, not forgetting
their services to Lent (hence the title). The Prayse of the
Red Herring soon develops into a kind of jest-book. But the
tales and anecdotes no longer turn on the humiliation of
monks or the 'quicke answers' of wenches? . Nashe wittily
parodies the legends of antiquity and adapts them to the
glorification of this homely fish. How the fable of Midas, who
turned everything to gold, originated from the fact that he
ate a red herring. How Leander and Hero (after a burlesque
account of their adventures, in Nashe's best manner) were con-
verted into fish-the youth to a ling, the maiden to a Cadwallader
herring and the old nurse, who had a sharp temper, into the
mustard which always accompanies them at table. The curing of
the herring was discovered in a manner suggestive of Charles
1 Vide C. H. Herford, The Literary Relations of England and Germany, chap. VII,
pp. 381--3. Also bibl. under Burlesque Encomia.
* Cf. A C. Mery Talys, Merie Tales of Master Skelton, The Geystes of Skoggan.
## p. 328 (#350) ############################################
328 London and Popular Literature
6
Lamb's roast pig, and the first red herring was sold to the pope
by methods reminiscent of the sibyl's sale of the prophetic books.
But, besides a sense of the romance of history, and an ingenious
appropriation of classical lore, there is an unmistakable love for
the sea and sympathy with the rough, simple life of seamen.
In one place, he tells how 'boystrous woolpacks of ridged tides
came rowling in. ? Again, he describes the cobbles which skim
'flightswift thorow the glassy fieldes of Thetis as if it were the land
of yce, and sliding over the boiling desert so earely and never
bruise one bubble of it. ' And he talks of these frostbitten crab-
tree faced lads, spunne out of the hards of the towe. '
Yet, Lenten Stuffe never enjoyed the popularity of Pierce
Penilesse. With all its cleverness and narrative power, the tract
did not gratify the Londoner's interest in city life. This taste for
realistic satire and humour continually increased and tended every
year to number more educated men within its ranks. At the same
time, court circles began to grow weary of Euphuism, and to prefer
discussing their fellow-creatures rather than indulging in the
apostrophes and soliloquies of prose romances' or such poems as
Ovid's Elegies? and Venus and Adonis. These two elements com-
bined to form an upper stratum in the general reading public.
'Select' persons lived in the same city as ordinary members of the
middle classes, and were attracted by the same phenomena. But
they were more fastidiously critical, and they looked more uncom-
promisingly for the stamp of classicism in any publication of which
they were to approves. Even Sir John Harington's Rabelaisian
descents into the secrets of cloacinean burlesque (1596) are illu-
minated with bookish allusions and classical quotations. The school
of pamphleteers who had formerly secured patronage with erotic
poetry now followed, perforce, the new tendency. Thomas Lodge set
the example, in 1595, by producing a slim volume of verse eclogues
and satires, and, with a show of self-assertion made fashionable by
Nashe, he entitled the venture A Fig for Momus.
Verse satire had flourished throughout the sixteenth century,
and, in many instances, developed individual portraiture under
the guise of types. Within the last fifty years, Crowley's One and
Thirty Epigrams (1550), Bansley's Pryde and Abuse of Women
6
* Ante, vol. II, ch. XVI.
3 Marlowe.
3 Note the condescension of Peacham : Compleat Gentleman, . There is no book 80
bad, even Sir Bevis himselfe, Owleglasse, or Nashe's herring, but some commodity may
be got out of it. '
4 See bibl. under Miscellaneous Burlesques.
## p. 329 (#351) ############################################
box
FI
PX
de
PP
Rise of Formal Satire 329
(1550), Hake’s Newes out of Poules Churcheyarde (1567) and
Gosson's Quippes for Upstart Gentlewomen (1596) had covered the
most prominent abuses of the time and kept pace with the growing
spirit of puritan censoriousness. But Lodge ignored their example
and revived the new genre which Wyatt' had introduced, almost
unobserved, into English literature: the avowed imitation and
occasional paraphrase of classical models. He chose Horace for
his satirical prototype; but, attempting to copy the Roman's genial
discursiveness, he merely gave the public ten dull, ill-constructed
satires and epistles, mingled with a few Vergilian eclogues. And
yet A Fig for Momus is important. Wyatt was before his time
and, moreover, confined his animadversions to the court, in a
difficult metre borrowed from the Italian. Lodge's production is
as miscellaneous and bookish as a volume of essays. Moreover, he
made current the use of pseudonymous allusion, and, while
Gascoigne had rather unsuccessfully experimented in blank verse,
he demonstrated that classical satire could be most effectively
written in the decasyllabic couplet.
In 1597, Joseph Hall, then a young fellow of Emmanuel college,
claimed the honour of being the first English satirist with
Virgidemiarum. It is possible that Hall's satires existed in
manuscript as early as 1591, and, again, it is just conceivable that
he was unacquainted with the work of Wyatt, Gascoigne, Donne
and Lodges. But, in any case, the boast of originality was partly
justified, inasmuch as Hall discovered Juvenal as the true model
for Elizabethan and Jacobean satire. In the hands of Horace, the
Roman Satura was little more than a series of desultory conver-
sations, dominated by an unembittered scepticism of human
activities. Juvenal, however, was a rhetorician, who devoted a life's
training in oratory to the task of making out a case against society.
As such, his satires have all the uncompromising sweep of an
indictment and are enforced with every artifice of arrangement
and expression. Both his systematic thoroughness and his aggres-
sive indignation, though largely a pose, were adapted to this
contentious age, and Hall may fairly claim to be the first who
reproduced his method and spirit in English verse“.
72
inte
A
1 Ante, vol. 11, chap. vi. For popular satirists, see ibid. chap. v.
? Sat. v, however, is an imitation of Juvenal x, and a forerunner of The Vanity
of Human Wishes.
3 Vide A. B. Grosart, Occasional Issues, vol. 1x, 1879; Bp. Hall's Complete Poems,
intro. , pp. vi-viii.
* Vide A. B. Grosart, ibid. pp. viii-xiv, for list of parallel passages between Hall
and Horace, Juvenal and Persius.
## p. 330 (#352) ############################################
330
London and Popular Literature
But this originality of imitation did not fetter a very living
interest in the questions of his own day. This was an age when all
educated men discussed literary criticism', and Hall devotes the
first book of his satires to these debatable topics. He merely
champions the poetic reaction of the nineties,' when he censures
the insipidity of love poetry, declaring that Cupid has now made
himself a place among the muses, who begin to tolerate stories of
the stews. ' Academic circles, however, must already have been
preparing the way for the Augustan age, when Hall ridicules such
poets as Spenser for compiling 'worm-eaten stories of old time,'
full of invocations and strange enchantments, and when, in a
graphic description of a play-house, he represents ‘Turkish Tam-
berlaine' stalking across the stage, declaiming verses of half
Italianised English, and followed by a 'selfe misformed lout,' who
mimics his gestures, disgraces the tragic muse and sets all his
spectators in a roar? . The second and third books deal with more
general abuses. But the commonplaces of satire gain new force
and directness from the spirit of cultured irony with which Hall
invests them. The time-honoured accusation against the fee-
serving physician3 reappears in the form of a sarcastic com-
mendation". The impostures of astrology are ridiculed by a
maliciously absurd calculation on the issue of a love affairs. We
have the inevitable satire on the gallant, but the form is new.
Ruffio is seen disporting himself in 'Pawles,' “picking his glutted
teeth since late noontide. Yet, on closer inspection, we find that
his face is pinched and his eye sunken, and we realise that the
youth is starving himself to buy clothing, the fantastic embellish-
ments of which give him the appearance of a scarecrow. And
Hall's most perfect piece of workmanship is a mock advertisement
in which a “gentle squire' looks for a “trencher-chaplaine,' and, in
return for abject servility and unremitting toil, offers him 'five
markes and winter liverie? ! '
The first three books of Virgidemiarum are termed 'tooth-
less satires,' because they aim at institutions, customs or con-
ventionalities. The last three are styled 'byting,' since they
attack individuals under pseudonyms which were probably no
a
i Ante, vol. II, bibl. to ch. xiv, p. 526.
3 Sat. III.
As Marlowe in his prologue deprecates the 'conceits' of 'clownage,'
Hall's tirade should be considered as an attack on the actors rather than on the author.
3 Cf. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Bullein's Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence,
1584.
4 Bk. 11, Sat. iv.
Ibid. Sat. VII.
6 Bk. III, Sat. VII.
7 Bk. 11, Sat. VI.
## p. 331 (#353) ############################################
Hall's Virgidemiarum 331
disguise to contemporaries. The composition is even more defec-
tive. Some pieces suggest the incoherences and obscurities of the
rough copy. But the future bishop had studied human nature in
the provinces, where a moralist may trace the ravages of a vicious
propensity through all the actions of a man's life. And so, among
the confusions and solecisms of his thought and diction, we find
a few sketches of misspent lives fully charged with mordant
irony. There is the story of old drivelling Lollio, toiling night
and day in poverty and squalor, extracting every groat from the
land, in order that his son may study at the inns of court
and have means to cultivate the dissipated refinements of the
cavalier. The son revels in the pleasures of the capital, where
he is too proud to recognise his father's acquaintances. But, when
visiting his home, he is an object of admiration to the simple
rustics. That is his father's reward. By and bye, the old man
dies, the son succeeds to the property and proves more grasping
than his sire. Hall entitles this sketch Arcades Ambo! . Then
there is Gallio, whose self-indulgence is regulated by an effeminate
regard for his well-being. He is a glutton at heart, but considera-
tions of health keep him from coarser food than plovers' wings.
Others may turn soldier or pirate from lust for blood or hope
of booty. Gallio must pick roses, play tennis and wed in early
adolescence. What though his children be puny?
Virginius de-
layed too long and now regrets that he cannot marry? Lastly, there
is the picture of the glittering hall along the roadside. You knock
at the gates but, like Maevius's Italianate poetry, all is showy with-
out but empty within. No smoke comes from the chimneys, the
sign of old-fashioned hospitality. The truth is that hunger and
death are now abroad, and the rich, who should make head against
them, have fled, leaving the poor to bear the brunt.
Although Hall's moral earnestness found few imitators in verse
satire, others were not slow to recognise the possibilities of Juve-
nalian invective as a literary exercise. Edward Guilpin produced
a volume entitled Skialetheia or A Shadowe of Truth (1598), pos-
sibly influenced by Du Bartas's Semaines“, in which he vigorously
protested against the emasculated poetry of his age, and claimed
that satires and epigrams were the only antidote. John Marston,
in the same year, coupled a very erotic poem, The Meta-
morphosis of Pygmalion's Image, with Certaine Satyres, which
were probably composed in haste to keep up with the new
1 Bk. iv, Sat. 11.
2 Ibid. Sat. iv.
* See bibl.
• Translated that year into English by Joshua Sylvester.
## p. 332 (#354) ############################################
332 London and Popular Literature
1
6
trend of literary taste. The work of both writers bears the mark
of academic fabrication. Yet both are unmistakably influenced
by the London around them. These satires are not moral de-
nunciations, but studies in hypocrisy, affectation and compromise
-vices peculiar to urban society—which they illustrate with life-
like silhouettes culled from the court, the ordinary, the street and
the aisle of St Paul's. Marston adds zest to these character
sketches by a literary controversy with Hall, who had satirised him
as Labeo? ; and, next year, abandoning love poetry once for all, he
produced another volume of satires, The Scourge of Villanie
(1599), in which the hypocrisy of the sensualist is exhibited in
its most offensive forms. The tract is memorable for an essay in
criticism' and a 'Dunciad’ combined, in the sixth satire. After in-
geniously accounting for The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion as an
object-lesson against erotic verse, Marston turns on his literary con-
frères, ridiculing the invocations of some, the dreams and visions
of others and the bathos to which the over-inspired descend. The
critics are even more contemptible. When Capro approves, we
know that he has found a line which 'incends his lustful blood';
Muto, the fop, admires what he cannot understand ; Friscus, in
criticising a book, always pretends to recognise passages from
Horace and Juvenal, though he has never read a line of either.
In these and similar productions, scurrility was rapidly becoming
an end and object in itself. The spirit of the Tudor 'flytings,'
which had reappeared in the Marprelate controversy and the
Harvey-Nashe feud, was now taking yet another lease of life
under the stimulating influence of Roman satire. But the licensers
became alarmed at this recrudescence of envy and hatred, and,
before the end of 1599, an order was issued to suppress the
offensive works of Nashe, Harvey, Hall, Guilpin, Marston and
others? However, the edict by no means brought peace and
goodwill into literature. A 'flyting' arose over The Scourge of
Villanie within two years of its suppression, and gladiatorial
combats continued, in the world of letters, to be the recognised
resource of the intellectually unemployed.
But, quite apart from personal animosity, formal satire was
bound to thrive among the upper classes. As we have seen, this
form of classical imitation originated in a reaction from love
poetry, but its subsequent developments were due to a deeper
movement. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a sense
1 Bk. Ili, Sat. x.
? See bibl. for particulars of the edict.
3 See bibl. under Flytings.
## p. 333 (#355) ############################################
( Humours'
333
of disillusionment was pervading the nation, caused, partly, by the
corruption of the governing classes, and, even more, by the bitter
social and religious antagonisms among the people themselves.
They began to lose faith in high ideals and heroic sentiments, and,
as the passions and deeds of men lost their hold on the imagina-
tion, the petty curiosities and materialised interests, inseparable
from city life, came out of the shadow. Attention was drawn
more and more to the commonplace side of human nature. This
tendency is already noticeable in Nashe, and, by the death of
Elizabeth, the moods and idiosyncrasies of people were becoming
the commonest themes of creative literature. As the physicians
had explained temperament to be dependent on the predominance
of one of the four humours or moistures-phlegm, blood, choler
and melancholy-which pervaded the physiology of man, it became
fashionable to dignify any mental characteristic or even pose with
the name of humour,' and to deem the most miserable affectations
worthy of literary comment!
The debasement of thought was accompanied by a growing
preoccupation in form and style. Seneca's maxim in hoc omnis
hyperbole extenditur ut ad verum mendacio perveniat began to be
universally abused. It will be pointed out elsewhere how this
decadence affected the theatre and caused the unsympathetic and
exaggerated portrayal of types to take the place of the humour
and pathos of incident. But it concerns us to notice here that
this artificiality of sentiment and expression, which caused the
decay of comedy, stimulated an enormous output of tractarian
literature. A vast number of miscellaneous pamphlets began to
appear. They treated the 'humours' of men hardly less effectively
than the theatre, and they offered endless opportunity for experi-
ments in style and classical imitation which the theatre did not
offer.
Juvenalian satire fell under this influence and became a fashion.
A large number of writers wrote in this style with elaborate and
suggestive titles? . Even R. C. , author of The Times Whistle, chose
the decasyllabic couplet as the vehicle for his homilies on such
subjects as atheism, pride, avarice, gluttony and lasciviousness.
His moralisations, like some of George Wither's, are unsuited to
1 Vide Shadwell, The Humourists, Epilogue; Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his
Humour, The Induction and The Magnetic Lady, introduction; John Marston, Scourge
of Villanie, Sat. &; S. Rowlands, The Letting of Humors Blood, Epig. 27; Nym bope-
lessly misuses the word : vide H. B. Wheatley, intro. to Merry Wives, 1886. Also
N. & Q. Ser. x, vol. xi, Feb. 20, 1909.
2 See bibl. under Satire.
## p. 334 (#356) ############################################
334
London and Popular Literature
dramatic form, but so vitalising was the study of London 'humours,'
that, while his denunciations of the more heinous vices are dull to
the extreme, his character sketches of men's weaknesses and
affectations are bright and vivid'.
At the end of the sixteenth century, it was discovered that the
abnormalities and eccentricities of conduct about which men
laughed and talked, rather than waxed indignant, could be best
portrayed by some detached, fragmentary form of composition,
and imitation of the Latin epigram became the rage. This interest
in human peculiarities and oddities dates from the production of
Mery Tales and Quicke Answers, and the new departure in
classicism impoverished the development of the jest-books as well
as of the drama. Even at that period, John Heywood had
embodied this type of anecdote in fragments of rough verse which
his publishers chose to call epigrams? , and Robert Crowley had
issued sallies of moral and social satire under the same name?
But the progress of civilisation and the growth of London had
made character far more complex, and the taste for literary form,
coupled with increasing social intercourse, had prepared men of
culture for the pointed Latin epigram which had already been
refined into a subtle but formidable weapon by the Italians from
the days of Pius II to Leo X (1458—1522). Sir John Harington
and Sir John Davies were among the first who adapted
this type to English uses, and they were followed by Thomas
Bastard (1597), John Weever (1598) and Samuel Rowlands (1600).
After the accession of James, Catullus and Martial were imitated
as frequently as Juvenal, and were preferred by those who realised
that 'humours' were a theme for the witticisms of conversation
rather than for the tirades of a moralist. John Davies of Hereford
was, perhaps, the most typical. In 1610 he brought out The
Scourge of Folly, depicting such social offences as Fuscus's
boorishness", Gorgonius's slovenly appearance", Brunnus's unctuous
manners and Classus's loquacity? . But the epigram, then as
always an offspring of social intercourse, must culminate in a
conceit, and Davies frequently relinquishes the scourging of folly
merely to present a play of paradox or fancy. In parting
company with satire, the epigram came to rely more on the
1 Vide satires Against shamıs' and 'Against pride. '
• See bibl.
3 The One and Thirty Epigrams, 1560.
4 Epig. 8.
* Epig. 101.
6 Epig. 1 or 2.
7 Epig. 263.
8 Cf. Epig. 176, comparing a gamester to the ivy which first loosens the masonry,
grows over and then holds it together, as a gambler does his estate.
a
## p. 335 (#357) ############################################
Epigram and Character Sketch
335
artifices of literary form, and its votaries, however frivolous their
theme, helped to prepare the age of Addison and Pope by
recognising the importance of workmanship and cultivating the
niceties of expression!
Bastard's work and that of Davies mark the stage when litera-
ture was being cultivated as a social art. The epigram has all the
atmosphere of a coterie. It is conceived in a lighter vein, it is
suited to the eccentricities, not the degradation, of character;
it adorns everyday interests with the charm of literary form ;
it is a detached fragmentary production convenient for circula-
tion. But, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was
discovered that the Theophrastian character sketch fulfilled all
these conditions, offered greater scope to the play of conversa-
tional idiom, gave the sanction of classical form to the age's love
of portrait-writing and, in some measure, satisfied the interests
which it was the function of the stage to gratify.
In order to understand the influence of Theophrastus, it must
be remembered that his life falls into the period 373—284 B. C. ,
when the Athenian commonwealth was a community of burghers,
all educated in the same manner, dressed in the same style and
occupied in the same pursuits. Their lives were not, apparently,
much complicated by political strife, commercial expansion, or
religious controversy. Hence, the moral and ethical differences of
men were noticeable only in the common traffic of existence, and
study of character became a close attention to details of conduct.
Theophrastus, probably under the inspiration of Aristotle, dis-
cusses about thirty cases in which men vary from normal perfection.
This variation he does not find in their appearance, dress or thoughts,
but in one side of their habitual conduct. A sketch or description
from this point of view requires a special technique. Theophrastus
begins each essay by briefly defining the quality under discussion-
be it irony, avarice, boorishness, or stupidity-and then illustrates
the definition by a number of typical actions. As the actions have no
necessary connection with each other, but are drawn from any kind
of situation, in which the particular propensity will betray itself,
the portraits may fairly claim to be generic. As the instances and
anecdotes are within the range of everyone's daily experience,
the portraits have a touch of reality. Now, character sketches, as
1 Cf. Epig. 106, which is practically a paraphrase of one of Bastard's on the
slowness of his composition.
Vide • The Analyses of Character' in Ethics, Bk. iv and Rhetoric, Bk. II.
## p. 336 (#358) ############################################
336 London and Popular Literature
we have seen, were already a common feature of English social
literature. But they were accidental productions subordinated to
the main interests of a connected work, produced without method,
overladen with non-essentials, or disfigured by gross caricature.
Theophrastus introduced three changes. He raised the character
sketch to the dignity of an independent creation, containing its
own interest within itself; he emphasised action as the essence of
such description; he provided a stereotyped technique. This
genre, the product of a simpler civilisation, but a more mature
literary art, was quickly adopted by the writers of the age and
transformed into a vehicle for ideas far beyond the dreams of the
inventor.
The first printed adaptation came from the pen of Joseph Hall,
who, after indulging his satirical vein, especially against Roman
Catholics, in Mundus alter et idem (1605), had devoted himself to
the production of moral and religious treatises. He published a
third series of Meditations and Vowes in 1606, and then settled on
the Theophrastian character sketch as a means of putting religious
problems in a practical light. In 1608 appeared Characters of
Virtues and Vices, an attempt to bring home to men's conviction
the nobleness of virtue and the baseness of vice. Nothing illus-
trates more clearly how tentative was the progress of social litera-
ture. Theophrastus had aimed at reproducing the humorous
.
sidel of social faults, Hall employs his method to expound the
practice of a moral system. The first book of characters, The
Characterisms of Virtue, all exemplify in different forms an ideal of
spiritual aloofness and self-mastery amid the errors and turmoil of
the age. This stoic doctrine in a Christian setting is seen not less
clearly in 'The Humble Man,' who can be more ashamed of honour
than grieved with contempt, because he thinks that causeless, this
deserved,' than in 'The Happy Man,' who ‘knows the world and
cares not for it; that, after many traverses of thought is grown to
know what he may trust to and stands now equally armed for all
events? ' But the character sketch was intended to describe action,
and Hall forces it to portray a state of mind. Thus, though there
are passages of a noble and restrained eloquence, the general
effect is wearisome and monotonous.
1 Vide intro. to The Characters of Theophrastus, English translation and revised
text, by Sir R. C. Jebb, re-edited by J. E. Sandy8, 1909.
9 The desire for stoic consistency was a feature of this unsettled age. Cf. Hamlet's
Give me the man that is not passion's slave,' and Ben Jonson's Discoveries, De sibi
molestis.
6
## p. 337 (#359) ############################################
The Man in the Moone
337
>
The second book, The Characterisms of Vices, has a no less
didactic purpose. But its object is to render vice despicable, and
Hall has, perforce, interwoven his descriptions with illustrations of
the complex follies and errors of his time. Thus, the second series
of characters, if less artistically perfect, serves a higher purpose and
embraces a wider field than the work of Theophrastus. We read
of frauds, superstitions, conspiracies, libels and lampoons, vain doc-
trines and reckless extravagance. Perhaps the best piece is the
character of The Ambitious Man,' in which we have an arraign-
ment of court life. The scornful irony of Virgidemiarum is revived
in the portrait of the courtier, a slave to all those who can advance
him, cleaving like a burr to a great man's coat, and, when accom-
panied by a friend from the country, crowding into the awful
presence,' in order to be seen talking with the mightiest in the
land.
But, in adapting Greek form to modern ideas, Hall has modified
the technique. As his subject has grown more complex, the initial
definition is refined into a conceit which implies more, though it
says less. For instance, 'The Patient Man’ is made of metal not
so hard as flexible,' superstition ‘is godless religion, devout impiety. '
The idea thus hinted at in a paradox, after careful elaboration, is
rounded off in an epigrammatic summary, whereas each chapter in
Theophrastus terminated abruptly.
Another indication of the new tendency is found in The Man
in the Moone, a popular treatise on practical morality composed
by W. M. in 1609. A belated traveller is represented as receiving
hospitality one night from the typical wise man of romance, a
venerable hermit who has seen all the world and contemns its
vanity. Thirty years earlier, such a situation would have de-
veloped into a dialogue full of confessions, apostrophes and
homilies. But, instead of a euphuistic disquisition, we learn that
the wise man is regarded as a magician, and that folks are coming
to have their fortunes told.
A stripling opens the gate and
describes the appearance of each visitor-drunkard, glutton,
usurer, lover, tobacconist (tobacco-smoker) and parasite. An elder
youth stands by the philosopher and delineates each character;
the old man, as fortune teller, predicts the consequences of
the enquirer's way of living. This triple method of portraiture
betrays no direct imitation, though some hints may have been
drawn from the character-sketches in Cynthia’s Revels. But so
descriptive an examination of well-doing and ill-doing would hardly
I. L. IV.
22
-
CH. XVI.
## p. 338 (#360) ############################################
338
London and Popular Literature
have been possible unless Hall had shown from Theophrastus how
much personal details signify in morality,
Meanwhile, the character sketch was assuming a new aspect in
the aristocratic circles of London. The period had come when
a number of courtiers, who were also scholars and men of the
world, were using their position to introduce among the ruling
classes more cultured' habits of thought and expression. A move-
ment was on foot, similar to that which Mme de Rambouillet
was soon to lead in France. English humanists had no salons
to which they could retreat from friction with the outer world, and
where intercourse with ladies could change in one generation from
insipid adulation to an artistic accomplishment. They cherished a
literary life of their own, and they used the Theophrastian character
sketch to draw attention to what was sordid or material both
within the court and without. These compositions were an amuse-
ment, at first privately circulated. None the less, they en-
couraged and interested people in conversational style and, by
emphasising the imperfections of others, raised their ideal for
themselves.
Sir Thomas Overbury was a prominent figure in this society,
and, after his death, twenty-one characters were added to the
second edition of his poem A Wife (1614), some by himself and
others by his friends, as the title admits. The collection, in its
final form, must have been largely the work of amateurs who had
come under Overbury's influence as a lover of culture. Their
publications were a tribute to the name of the man who had
practised and, perhaps, introduced the art, and the interest
aroused in his death would ensure a good sale. The volume
contains three distinct styles of character sketch : the eulogistic,
the satirical and the humorous. But, among variations of detail,
the whole series presents a unity not inconsistent with cooperation:
the review of society from the experienced courtier's point of
view. In the first place, we have a number of commendatory
portraits, which, unlike Hall's, are not spiritual studies, but
examples of how 'a worthy commander in the warres' would act
who knows the hazard of battle, never pardons a mistake in the
field and despises calumny. Or, it is a model of 'A noble and
retired house-keeper' (landed gentleman), still cherishing a spirit
of old-fashioned hospitality in a country seat whose Gothic archi-
tecture will ‘outlast much of our new fantasticall building. Or,
best of all, a 'franklin,' who withstands the modern scramble for
## p. 339 (#361) ############################################
>
The Overbury Characters 339
wealth, never goes to law, does not evict tenants to enclose pastures
and, despite the puritans, would approve of king James's per-
mission' for dancing in the churchyard after evensong. Or, lastly,
'An excellent actor,' one of the earliest and most successful
attempts to place that profession among the fine arts, in the
teeth of calumny.
But class spirit becomes more evident in the satirical portrait.
A series of sketches expose, with the bitterest caricature, the
shifts and antics of the upstart courtier: his meanness, servility
and sordid materialism. Even The Dissembler' is no longer a
mere transgressor against good faith, but a diplomatist who ‘baits
craft with humility. . . and of the humours of men weaves a net for
occasion. When character beyond the pale of the court is studied,
it is the obstinate narrowness, the hostility to the refinements of a
liberal education, among the inns of court, the university or the
country gentry, which are emphasised? This bias is best illustrated
by the character of 'An hypocrite,' which begins with an analysis
of the type on broad lines, but soon parrows into a pamphleteering
attack on the puritan, who condemns the culture of the age as
'vaine ostentation,' revolts against all authority of church or king
and yet exacts not only maintenance and obedience but even
admiration from the sect over which he tyrannises.
These sketches and descriptions follow the Theophrastian tech-
nique, but the style is highly coloured by a conversational element.
vaine glory is any excessive pride or delight which we take in things unneces-
sary; much of the nature is it of ambition but it is not so dangerous or
conversant about so great matters as ambition. It is (as I may call it) the
froth and seething up of ambition.
This play of thought and fancy on familiar ideas, already notice-
able in The Anatomie of Absurditie, illustrates a habit of mind
made familiar to us by Bacon and his school.
But Nashe was not destined to create the essay. He had,
indeed, the sympathy with daily life, the knowledge of character,
and the familiarity with classical wisdom necessary to cultivate
this genre. But he had also to earn his bread and pay his debts.
He could not distil his philosophy into a volume of detached
counsels and reflections, which might slowly win its way. So
he continued to squander his wit, learning and experience in
pamphlets 'botched up and compyled' on the sensations of the
moment.
Thus, in his next production, reflections on Turkey, Iceland,
physiognomy, consumption and Camden hurtle one another in a
counterblast to dream-superstitions. Europe, at this moment,
was agitated with the belief that the devil was regaining his
control over man. His handiwork was being discovered every-
where; old women were witches, cats were spirits or transfigured
men, dreams were messages from hell. The report of a gentleman,
who died after experiencing seven fantastic visions, had just re-
awakened Englishmen's alarm at the unseen perils of sleep and
darkness. Nashe seized this opportunity to compose the Terrors
of the Night. At this time, demonology belonged to the realms
of theological disquisition. Even R. Scot had not escaped the
academic atmosphere, and G. Gifford" and H. Holland” had
recently delivered themselves of treatises unutterably scholastic.
It is a striking illustration of the vitality of popular literature
that Nashe discovered how to burst the bubble of these super-
stitions by sound common sense and sympathetic insight into
human nature. He claims that one thought of faith will put
to flight all the powers of evil, and answers with a volley of
ridicule the dogma of St Chrysostom that the devil can multiply
himself indefinitely. He quotes history to prove that dreams
seldom or never come true unless they are direct intimations from
1 Discourse of the subtile Practises of Devilles, 1587.
? A Treatise against Witchcraft, 1590.
## p. 326 (#348) ############################################
326 London and Popular Literature
6
a
6
God; and he refutes the belief in astrologers from his own experi-
ence of their careers. Most of them, he declares, began as
apothecaries' apprentices and dogleeches, who used to impose on
rustics with ointments and syrups made of toasted cheese and
candle ends. By and bye, some needy gallant hears of their
practices and introduces them to a nobleman on condition of
sharing the profits. Thus, they make their way through the
world, sometimes rising by their counterfeit art to the position of
privy councillor. He disposes of the mystery of dreams, explain-
ing them as after-effects of the day's activity ; 'echoes of our con-
ceipts,' often coloured by sensations felt in sleep, so that the sound
of a dog's bark suggests the 'complaint of damned ghosts' in hell,
and he that is spiced wyth the gowte or the dropsie' dreams of
fetters and manacles. This theory had already been outlined by
Scot', but Nashe surpasses the older controversialist when he
describes the moral terrors of the night. Not only does a guilty
conscience breed 'superstitions as good as an hundred furies, but
the sorrows and anxieties of life have special power, as Bullein
had pointed out? , in the loneliness and gloom of sleep-time.
But Nashe was never again to approach so near the high level
of a moralist. Some more skirmishing took place between him
and Gabriel Harvey in the autumn of 1593 and in 1594%. And
then, in 1596, he produced Have with you to Saffron-Walden, or,
Gabriell Harveys Hunt is up.
This piece of invective is unique in English literature, and it
exhausts the literary resources of the age. To multiply his
ridicule and give scope to his digressions, he borrowed from
comedy and cast the lampoon into the form of a tetralogue, in
which four speakers contribute to criticise Harvey's style and to
make merry over his humble origin. Then ensues a burlesque
biography of the doctor. His conception and birth are narrated
in the manner of Rabelais, and his academic character is travestied
on the model of Pedantius * Nashe creates a truly infernal
picture of the university scholar, absorbed in his own spite:
In the deadest season that might bee, hee lying in the ragingest furie of
the last plague, when there dyde above 1600 a week in London, ink-squitter-
ing and printing against me at Wolfes in Powles churchyard.
1 Discoverie of Witchcraft, 1584, Bk. x.
? Bulwarke of Defence : Booke of Compoundes, fol. liiij.
3 Ante, vol. in, ch. XVII, bibl. , p. 546.
* See ed. Moore Smith (Louvain, 1905) and post, vol. v, the chapter on Academic
Plays.
## p. 327 (#349) ############################################
Lenten Stuffe
327
Neither Nashe nor anyone else expected such accusations to
be taken seriously. But the tract deserves a place in permanent
literature. It is a saturnalia of invective such as only the age
could produce. Nor must we regard this intellect and ingenuity
as altogether wasted in a barren attempt to defame a fellow-
creature. The impeachment was composed for a critical audience,
and, in the effort to attain rhetorical effect, the art of expression
was perceptibly enlarged. Among other features, there is a full-
length portrait of Harvey, executed with a thoroughness of detail
which Mme de Scudéry might have envied, and the character of
an intelligencer which the Overbury collection never surpassed.
Nashe passed through two years of adversity, and then
reappeared in 1599 with Lenten Stuffe. This pamphlet is an
ambitious attempt to 'wring juice out of a flint’: to heighten his
humour by extracting it from unproductive material, and he
succeeds in uniting many of the lighter types of prose literature
in a single pamphlet. He begins by introducing a personal note
telling the public of his literary difficulties and financial em-
barrassments. These led him to leave London. In return for the
hospitality which he enjoyed at Yarmouth, he recounts the history
of that town (drawn from Camden) in a fine spirit of pageantry,
trumpeting its origin and development 'as I have scrapped out of
worm-eaten Parchments. He then treats his readers to a speci-
men of burlesque encomium, such as the Romans, Italians and
especially the German anti-Grobianists, had made popular",
working up an eulogy on the herring fisheries, not forgetting
their services to Lent (hence the title). The Prayse of the
Red Herring soon develops into a kind of jest-book. But the
tales and anecdotes no longer turn on the humiliation of
monks or the 'quicke answers' of wenches? . Nashe wittily
parodies the legends of antiquity and adapts them to the
glorification of this homely fish. How the fable of Midas, who
turned everything to gold, originated from the fact that he
ate a red herring. How Leander and Hero (after a burlesque
account of their adventures, in Nashe's best manner) were con-
verted into fish-the youth to a ling, the maiden to a Cadwallader
herring and the old nurse, who had a sharp temper, into the
mustard which always accompanies them at table. The curing of
the herring was discovered in a manner suggestive of Charles
1 Vide C. H. Herford, The Literary Relations of England and Germany, chap. VII,
pp. 381--3. Also bibl. under Burlesque Encomia.
* Cf. A C. Mery Talys, Merie Tales of Master Skelton, The Geystes of Skoggan.
## p. 328 (#350) ############################################
328 London and Popular Literature
6
Lamb's roast pig, and the first red herring was sold to the pope
by methods reminiscent of the sibyl's sale of the prophetic books.
But, besides a sense of the romance of history, and an ingenious
appropriation of classical lore, there is an unmistakable love for
the sea and sympathy with the rough, simple life of seamen.
In one place, he tells how 'boystrous woolpacks of ridged tides
came rowling in. ? Again, he describes the cobbles which skim
'flightswift thorow the glassy fieldes of Thetis as if it were the land
of yce, and sliding over the boiling desert so earely and never
bruise one bubble of it. ' And he talks of these frostbitten crab-
tree faced lads, spunne out of the hards of the towe. '
Yet, Lenten Stuffe never enjoyed the popularity of Pierce
Penilesse. With all its cleverness and narrative power, the tract
did not gratify the Londoner's interest in city life. This taste for
realistic satire and humour continually increased and tended every
year to number more educated men within its ranks. At the same
time, court circles began to grow weary of Euphuism, and to prefer
discussing their fellow-creatures rather than indulging in the
apostrophes and soliloquies of prose romances' or such poems as
Ovid's Elegies? and Venus and Adonis. These two elements com-
bined to form an upper stratum in the general reading public.
'Select' persons lived in the same city as ordinary members of the
middle classes, and were attracted by the same phenomena. But
they were more fastidiously critical, and they looked more uncom-
promisingly for the stamp of classicism in any publication of which
they were to approves. Even Sir John Harington's Rabelaisian
descents into the secrets of cloacinean burlesque (1596) are illu-
minated with bookish allusions and classical quotations. The school
of pamphleteers who had formerly secured patronage with erotic
poetry now followed, perforce, the new tendency. Thomas Lodge set
the example, in 1595, by producing a slim volume of verse eclogues
and satires, and, with a show of self-assertion made fashionable by
Nashe, he entitled the venture A Fig for Momus.
Verse satire had flourished throughout the sixteenth century,
and, in many instances, developed individual portraiture under
the guise of types. Within the last fifty years, Crowley's One and
Thirty Epigrams (1550), Bansley's Pryde and Abuse of Women
6
* Ante, vol. II, ch. XVI.
3 Marlowe.
3 Note the condescension of Peacham : Compleat Gentleman, . There is no book 80
bad, even Sir Bevis himselfe, Owleglasse, or Nashe's herring, but some commodity may
be got out of it. '
4 See bibl. under Miscellaneous Burlesques.
## p. 329 (#351) ############################################
box
FI
PX
de
PP
Rise of Formal Satire 329
(1550), Hake’s Newes out of Poules Churcheyarde (1567) and
Gosson's Quippes for Upstart Gentlewomen (1596) had covered the
most prominent abuses of the time and kept pace with the growing
spirit of puritan censoriousness. But Lodge ignored their example
and revived the new genre which Wyatt' had introduced, almost
unobserved, into English literature: the avowed imitation and
occasional paraphrase of classical models. He chose Horace for
his satirical prototype; but, attempting to copy the Roman's genial
discursiveness, he merely gave the public ten dull, ill-constructed
satires and epistles, mingled with a few Vergilian eclogues. And
yet A Fig for Momus is important. Wyatt was before his time
and, moreover, confined his animadversions to the court, in a
difficult metre borrowed from the Italian. Lodge's production is
as miscellaneous and bookish as a volume of essays. Moreover, he
made current the use of pseudonymous allusion, and, while
Gascoigne had rather unsuccessfully experimented in blank verse,
he demonstrated that classical satire could be most effectively
written in the decasyllabic couplet.
In 1597, Joseph Hall, then a young fellow of Emmanuel college,
claimed the honour of being the first English satirist with
Virgidemiarum. It is possible that Hall's satires existed in
manuscript as early as 1591, and, again, it is just conceivable that
he was unacquainted with the work of Wyatt, Gascoigne, Donne
and Lodges. But, in any case, the boast of originality was partly
justified, inasmuch as Hall discovered Juvenal as the true model
for Elizabethan and Jacobean satire. In the hands of Horace, the
Roman Satura was little more than a series of desultory conver-
sations, dominated by an unembittered scepticism of human
activities. Juvenal, however, was a rhetorician, who devoted a life's
training in oratory to the task of making out a case against society.
As such, his satires have all the uncompromising sweep of an
indictment and are enforced with every artifice of arrangement
and expression. Both his systematic thoroughness and his aggres-
sive indignation, though largely a pose, were adapted to this
contentious age, and Hall may fairly claim to be the first who
reproduced his method and spirit in English verse“.
72
inte
A
1 Ante, vol. 11, chap. vi. For popular satirists, see ibid. chap. v.
? Sat. v, however, is an imitation of Juvenal x, and a forerunner of The Vanity
of Human Wishes.
3 Vide A. B. Grosart, Occasional Issues, vol. 1x, 1879; Bp. Hall's Complete Poems,
intro. , pp. vi-viii.
* Vide A. B. Grosart, ibid. pp. viii-xiv, for list of parallel passages between Hall
and Horace, Juvenal and Persius.
## p. 330 (#352) ############################################
330
London and Popular Literature
But this originality of imitation did not fetter a very living
interest in the questions of his own day. This was an age when all
educated men discussed literary criticism', and Hall devotes the
first book of his satires to these debatable topics. He merely
champions the poetic reaction of the nineties,' when he censures
the insipidity of love poetry, declaring that Cupid has now made
himself a place among the muses, who begin to tolerate stories of
the stews. ' Academic circles, however, must already have been
preparing the way for the Augustan age, when Hall ridicules such
poets as Spenser for compiling 'worm-eaten stories of old time,'
full of invocations and strange enchantments, and when, in a
graphic description of a play-house, he represents ‘Turkish Tam-
berlaine' stalking across the stage, declaiming verses of half
Italianised English, and followed by a 'selfe misformed lout,' who
mimics his gestures, disgraces the tragic muse and sets all his
spectators in a roar? . The second and third books deal with more
general abuses. But the commonplaces of satire gain new force
and directness from the spirit of cultured irony with which Hall
invests them. The time-honoured accusation against the fee-
serving physician3 reappears in the form of a sarcastic com-
mendation". The impostures of astrology are ridiculed by a
maliciously absurd calculation on the issue of a love affairs. We
have the inevitable satire on the gallant, but the form is new.
Ruffio is seen disporting himself in 'Pawles,' “picking his glutted
teeth since late noontide. Yet, on closer inspection, we find that
his face is pinched and his eye sunken, and we realise that the
youth is starving himself to buy clothing, the fantastic embellish-
ments of which give him the appearance of a scarecrow. And
Hall's most perfect piece of workmanship is a mock advertisement
in which a “gentle squire' looks for a “trencher-chaplaine,' and, in
return for abject servility and unremitting toil, offers him 'five
markes and winter liverie? ! '
The first three books of Virgidemiarum are termed 'tooth-
less satires,' because they aim at institutions, customs or con-
ventionalities. The last three are styled 'byting,' since they
attack individuals under pseudonyms which were probably no
a
i Ante, vol. II, bibl. to ch. xiv, p. 526.
3 Sat. III.
As Marlowe in his prologue deprecates the 'conceits' of 'clownage,'
Hall's tirade should be considered as an attack on the actors rather than on the author.
3 Cf. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Bullein's Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence,
1584.
4 Bk. 11, Sat. iv.
Ibid. Sat. VII.
6 Bk. III, Sat. VII.
7 Bk. 11, Sat. VI.
## p. 331 (#353) ############################################
Hall's Virgidemiarum 331
disguise to contemporaries. The composition is even more defec-
tive. Some pieces suggest the incoherences and obscurities of the
rough copy. But the future bishop had studied human nature in
the provinces, where a moralist may trace the ravages of a vicious
propensity through all the actions of a man's life. And so, among
the confusions and solecisms of his thought and diction, we find
a few sketches of misspent lives fully charged with mordant
irony. There is the story of old drivelling Lollio, toiling night
and day in poverty and squalor, extracting every groat from the
land, in order that his son may study at the inns of court
and have means to cultivate the dissipated refinements of the
cavalier. The son revels in the pleasures of the capital, where
he is too proud to recognise his father's acquaintances. But, when
visiting his home, he is an object of admiration to the simple
rustics. That is his father's reward. By and bye, the old man
dies, the son succeeds to the property and proves more grasping
than his sire. Hall entitles this sketch Arcades Ambo! . Then
there is Gallio, whose self-indulgence is regulated by an effeminate
regard for his well-being. He is a glutton at heart, but considera-
tions of health keep him from coarser food than plovers' wings.
Others may turn soldier or pirate from lust for blood or hope
of booty. Gallio must pick roses, play tennis and wed in early
adolescence. What though his children be puny?
Virginius de-
layed too long and now regrets that he cannot marry? Lastly, there
is the picture of the glittering hall along the roadside. You knock
at the gates but, like Maevius's Italianate poetry, all is showy with-
out but empty within. No smoke comes from the chimneys, the
sign of old-fashioned hospitality. The truth is that hunger and
death are now abroad, and the rich, who should make head against
them, have fled, leaving the poor to bear the brunt.
Although Hall's moral earnestness found few imitators in verse
satire, others were not slow to recognise the possibilities of Juve-
nalian invective as a literary exercise. Edward Guilpin produced
a volume entitled Skialetheia or A Shadowe of Truth (1598), pos-
sibly influenced by Du Bartas's Semaines“, in which he vigorously
protested against the emasculated poetry of his age, and claimed
that satires and epigrams were the only antidote. John Marston,
in the same year, coupled a very erotic poem, The Meta-
morphosis of Pygmalion's Image, with Certaine Satyres, which
were probably composed in haste to keep up with the new
1 Bk. iv, Sat. 11.
2 Ibid. Sat. iv.
* See bibl.
• Translated that year into English by Joshua Sylvester.
## p. 332 (#354) ############################################
332 London and Popular Literature
1
6
trend of literary taste. The work of both writers bears the mark
of academic fabrication. Yet both are unmistakably influenced
by the London around them. These satires are not moral de-
nunciations, but studies in hypocrisy, affectation and compromise
-vices peculiar to urban society—which they illustrate with life-
like silhouettes culled from the court, the ordinary, the street and
the aisle of St Paul's. Marston adds zest to these character
sketches by a literary controversy with Hall, who had satirised him
as Labeo? ; and, next year, abandoning love poetry once for all, he
produced another volume of satires, The Scourge of Villanie
(1599), in which the hypocrisy of the sensualist is exhibited in
its most offensive forms. The tract is memorable for an essay in
criticism' and a 'Dunciad’ combined, in the sixth satire. After in-
geniously accounting for The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion as an
object-lesson against erotic verse, Marston turns on his literary con-
frères, ridiculing the invocations of some, the dreams and visions
of others and the bathos to which the over-inspired descend. The
critics are even more contemptible. When Capro approves, we
know that he has found a line which 'incends his lustful blood';
Muto, the fop, admires what he cannot understand ; Friscus, in
criticising a book, always pretends to recognise passages from
Horace and Juvenal, though he has never read a line of either.
In these and similar productions, scurrility was rapidly becoming
an end and object in itself. The spirit of the Tudor 'flytings,'
which had reappeared in the Marprelate controversy and the
Harvey-Nashe feud, was now taking yet another lease of life
under the stimulating influence of Roman satire. But the licensers
became alarmed at this recrudescence of envy and hatred, and,
before the end of 1599, an order was issued to suppress the
offensive works of Nashe, Harvey, Hall, Guilpin, Marston and
others? However, the edict by no means brought peace and
goodwill into literature. A 'flyting' arose over The Scourge of
Villanie within two years of its suppression, and gladiatorial
combats continued, in the world of letters, to be the recognised
resource of the intellectually unemployed.
But, quite apart from personal animosity, formal satire was
bound to thrive among the upper classes. As we have seen, this
form of classical imitation originated in a reaction from love
poetry, but its subsequent developments were due to a deeper
movement. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, a sense
1 Bk. Ili, Sat. x.
? See bibl. for particulars of the edict.
3 See bibl. under Flytings.
## p. 333 (#355) ############################################
( Humours'
333
of disillusionment was pervading the nation, caused, partly, by the
corruption of the governing classes, and, even more, by the bitter
social and religious antagonisms among the people themselves.
They began to lose faith in high ideals and heroic sentiments, and,
as the passions and deeds of men lost their hold on the imagina-
tion, the petty curiosities and materialised interests, inseparable
from city life, came out of the shadow. Attention was drawn
more and more to the commonplace side of human nature. This
tendency is already noticeable in Nashe, and, by the death of
Elizabeth, the moods and idiosyncrasies of people were becoming
the commonest themes of creative literature. As the physicians
had explained temperament to be dependent on the predominance
of one of the four humours or moistures-phlegm, blood, choler
and melancholy-which pervaded the physiology of man, it became
fashionable to dignify any mental characteristic or even pose with
the name of humour,' and to deem the most miserable affectations
worthy of literary comment!
The debasement of thought was accompanied by a growing
preoccupation in form and style. Seneca's maxim in hoc omnis
hyperbole extenditur ut ad verum mendacio perveniat began to be
universally abused. It will be pointed out elsewhere how this
decadence affected the theatre and caused the unsympathetic and
exaggerated portrayal of types to take the place of the humour
and pathos of incident. But it concerns us to notice here that
this artificiality of sentiment and expression, which caused the
decay of comedy, stimulated an enormous output of tractarian
literature. A vast number of miscellaneous pamphlets began to
appear. They treated the 'humours' of men hardly less effectively
than the theatre, and they offered endless opportunity for experi-
ments in style and classical imitation which the theatre did not
offer.
Juvenalian satire fell under this influence and became a fashion.
A large number of writers wrote in this style with elaborate and
suggestive titles? . Even R. C. , author of The Times Whistle, chose
the decasyllabic couplet as the vehicle for his homilies on such
subjects as atheism, pride, avarice, gluttony and lasciviousness.
His moralisations, like some of George Wither's, are unsuited to
1 Vide Shadwell, The Humourists, Epilogue; Ben Jonson, Every Man out of his
Humour, The Induction and The Magnetic Lady, introduction; John Marston, Scourge
of Villanie, Sat. &; S. Rowlands, The Letting of Humors Blood, Epig. 27; Nym bope-
lessly misuses the word : vide H. B. Wheatley, intro. to Merry Wives, 1886. Also
N. & Q. Ser. x, vol. xi, Feb. 20, 1909.
2 See bibl. under Satire.
## p. 334 (#356) ############################################
334
London and Popular Literature
dramatic form, but so vitalising was the study of London 'humours,'
that, while his denunciations of the more heinous vices are dull to
the extreme, his character sketches of men's weaknesses and
affectations are bright and vivid'.
At the end of the sixteenth century, it was discovered that the
abnormalities and eccentricities of conduct about which men
laughed and talked, rather than waxed indignant, could be best
portrayed by some detached, fragmentary form of composition,
and imitation of the Latin epigram became the rage. This interest
in human peculiarities and oddities dates from the production of
Mery Tales and Quicke Answers, and the new departure in
classicism impoverished the development of the jest-books as well
as of the drama. Even at that period, John Heywood had
embodied this type of anecdote in fragments of rough verse which
his publishers chose to call epigrams? , and Robert Crowley had
issued sallies of moral and social satire under the same name?
But the progress of civilisation and the growth of London had
made character far more complex, and the taste for literary form,
coupled with increasing social intercourse, had prepared men of
culture for the pointed Latin epigram which had already been
refined into a subtle but formidable weapon by the Italians from
the days of Pius II to Leo X (1458—1522). Sir John Harington
and Sir John Davies were among the first who adapted
this type to English uses, and they were followed by Thomas
Bastard (1597), John Weever (1598) and Samuel Rowlands (1600).
After the accession of James, Catullus and Martial were imitated
as frequently as Juvenal, and were preferred by those who realised
that 'humours' were a theme for the witticisms of conversation
rather than for the tirades of a moralist. John Davies of Hereford
was, perhaps, the most typical. In 1610 he brought out The
Scourge of Folly, depicting such social offences as Fuscus's
boorishness", Gorgonius's slovenly appearance", Brunnus's unctuous
manners and Classus's loquacity? . But the epigram, then as
always an offspring of social intercourse, must culminate in a
conceit, and Davies frequently relinquishes the scourging of folly
merely to present a play of paradox or fancy. In parting
company with satire, the epigram came to rely more on the
1 Vide satires Against shamıs' and 'Against pride. '
• See bibl.
3 The One and Thirty Epigrams, 1560.
4 Epig. 8.
* Epig. 101.
6 Epig. 1 or 2.
7 Epig. 263.
8 Cf. Epig. 176, comparing a gamester to the ivy which first loosens the masonry,
grows over and then holds it together, as a gambler does his estate.
a
## p. 335 (#357) ############################################
Epigram and Character Sketch
335
artifices of literary form, and its votaries, however frivolous their
theme, helped to prepare the age of Addison and Pope by
recognising the importance of workmanship and cultivating the
niceties of expression!
Bastard's work and that of Davies mark the stage when litera-
ture was being cultivated as a social art. The epigram has all the
atmosphere of a coterie. It is conceived in a lighter vein, it is
suited to the eccentricities, not the degradation, of character;
it adorns everyday interests with the charm of literary form ;
it is a detached fragmentary production convenient for circula-
tion. But, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was
discovered that the Theophrastian character sketch fulfilled all
these conditions, offered greater scope to the play of conversa-
tional idiom, gave the sanction of classical form to the age's love
of portrait-writing and, in some measure, satisfied the interests
which it was the function of the stage to gratify.
In order to understand the influence of Theophrastus, it must
be remembered that his life falls into the period 373—284 B. C. ,
when the Athenian commonwealth was a community of burghers,
all educated in the same manner, dressed in the same style and
occupied in the same pursuits. Their lives were not, apparently,
much complicated by political strife, commercial expansion, or
religious controversy. Hence, the moral and ethical differences of
men were noticeable only in the common traffic of existence, and
study of character became a close attention to details of conduct.
Theophrastus, probably under the inspiration of Aristotle, dis-
cusses about thirty cases in which men vary from normal perfection.
This variation he does not find in their appearance, dress or thoughts,
but in one side of their habitual conduct. A sketch or description
from this point of view requires a special technique. Theophrastus
begins each essay by briefly defining the quality under discussion-
be it irony, avarice, boorishness, or stupidity-and then illustrates
the definition by a number of typical actions. As the actions have no
necessary connection with each other, but are drawn from any kind
of situation, in which the particular propensity will betray itself,
the portraits may fairly claim to be generic. As the instances and
anecdotes are within the range of everyone's daily experience,
the portraits have a touch of reality. Now, character sketches, as
1 Cf. Epig. 106, which is practically a paraphrase of one of Bastard's on the
slowness of his composition.
Vide • The Analyses of Character' in Ethics, Bk. iv and Rhetoric, Bk. II.
## p. 336 (#358) ############################################
336 London and Popular Literature
we have seen, were already a common feature of English social
literature. But they were accidental productions subordinated to
the main interests of a connected work, produced without method,
overladen with non-essentials, or disfigured by gross caricature.
Theophrastus introduced three changes. He raised the character
sketch to the dignity of an independent creation, containing its
own interest within itself; he emphasised action as the essence of
such description; he provided a stereotyped technique. This
genre, the product of a simpler civilisation, but a more mature
literary art, was quickly adopted by the writers of the age and
transformed into a vehicle for ideas far beyond the dreams of the
inventor.
The first printed adaptation came from the pen of Joseph Hall,
who, after indulging his satirical vein, especially against Roman
Catholics, in Mundus alter et idem (1605), had devoted himself to
the production of moral and religious treatises. He published a
third series of Meditations and Vowes in 1606, and then settled on
the Theophrastian character sketch as a means of putting religious
problems in a practical light. In 1608 appeared Characters of
Virtues and Vices, an attempt to bring home to men's conviction
the nobleness of virtue and the baseness of vice. Nothing illus-
trates more clearly how tentative was the progress of social litera-
ture. Theophrastus had aimed at reproducing the humorous
.
sidel of social faults, Hall employs his method to expound the
practice of a moral system. The first book of characters, The
Characterisms of Virtue, all exemplify in different forms an ideal of
spiritual aloofness and self-mastery amid the errors and turmoil of
the age. This stoic doctrine in a Christian setting is seen not less
clearly in 'The Humble Man,' who can be more ashamed of honour
than grieved with contempt, because he thinks that causeless, this
deserved,' than in 'The Happy Man,' who ‘knows the world and
cares not for it; that, after many traverses of thought is grown to
know what he may trust to and stands now equally armed for all
events? ' But the character sketch was intended to describe action,
and Hall forces it to portray a state of mind. Thus, though there
are passages of a noble and restrained eloquence, the general
effect is wearisome and monotonous.
1 Vide intro. to The Characters of Theophrastus, English translation and revised
text, by Sir R. C. Jebb, re-edited by J. E. Sandy8, 1909.
9 The desire for stoic consistency was a feature of this unsettled age. Cf. Hamlet's
Give me the man that is not passion's slave,' and Ben Jonson's Discoveries, De sibi
molestis.
6
## p. 337 (#359) ############################################
The Man in the Moone
337
>
The second book, The Characterisms of Vices, has a no less
didactic purpose. But its object is to render vice despicable, and
Hall has, perforce, interwoven his descriptions with illustrations of
the complex follies and errors of his time. Thus, the second series
of characters, if less artistically perfect, serves a higher purpose and
embraces a wider field than the work of Theophrastus. We read
of frauds, superstitions, conspiracies, libels and lampoons, vain doc-
trines and reckless extravagance. Perhaps the best piece is the
character of The Ambitious Man,' in which we have an arraign-
ment of court life. The scornful irony of Virgidemiarum is revived
in the portrait of the courtier, a slave to all those who can advance
him, cleaving like a burr to a great man's coat, and, when accom-
panied by a friend from the country, crowding into the awful
presence,' in order to be seen talking with the mightiest in the
land.
But, in adapting Greek form to modern ideas, Hall has modified
the technique. As his subject has grown more complex, the initial
definition is refined into a conceit which implies more, though it
says less. For instance, 'The Patient Man’ is made of metal not
so hard as flexible,' superstition ‘is godless religion, devout impiety. '
The idea thus hinted at in a paradox, after careful elaboration, is
rounded off in an epigrammatic summary, whereas each chapter in
Theophrastus terminated abruptly.
Another indication of the new tendency is found in The Man
in the Moone, a popular treatise on practical morality composed
by W. M. in 1609. A belated traveller is represented as receiving
hospitality one night from the typical wise man of romance, a
venerable hermit who has seen all the world and contemns its
vanity. Thirty years earlier, such a situation would have de-
veloped into a dialogue full of confessions, apostrophes and
homilies. But, instead of a euphuistic disquisition, we learn that
the wise man is regarded as a magician, and that folks are coming
to have their fortunes told.
A stripling opens the gate and
describes the appearance of each visitor-drunkard, glutton,
usurer, lover, tobacconist (tobacco-smoker) and parasite. An elder
youth stands by the philosopher and delineates each character;
the old man, as fortune teller, predicts the consequences of
the enquirer's way of living. This triple method of portraiture
betrays no direct imitation, though some hints may have been
drawn from the character-sketches in Cynthia’s Revels. But so
descriptive an examination of well-doing and ill-doing would hardly
I. L. IV.
22
-
CH. XVI.
## p. 338 (#360) ############################################
338
London and Popular Literature
have been possible unless Hall had shown from Theophrastus how
much personal details signify in morality,
Meanwhile, the character sketch was assuming a new aspect in
the aristocratic circles of London. The period had come when
a number of courtiers, who were also scholars and men of the
world, were using their position to introduce among the ruling
classes more cultured' habits of thought and expression. A move-
ment was on foot, similar to that which Mme de Rambouillet
was soon to lead in France. English humanists had no salons
to which they could retreat from friction with the outer world, and
where intercourse with ladies could change in one generation from
insipid adulation to an artistic accomplishment. They cherished a
literary life of their own, and they used the Theophrastian character
sketch to draw attention to what was sordid or material both
within the court and without. These compositions were an amuse-
ment, at first privately circulated. None the less, they en-
couraged and interested people in conversational style and, by
emphasising the imperfections of others, raised their ideal for
themselves.
Sir Thomas Overbury was a prominent figure in this society,
and, after his death, twenty-one characters were added to the
second edition of his poem A Wife (1614), some by himself and
others by his friends, as the title admits. The collection, in its
final form, must have been largely the work of amateurs who had
come under Overbury's influence as a lover of culture. Their
publications were a tribute to the name of the man who had
practised and, perhaps, introduced the art, and the interest
aroused in his death would ensure a good sale. The volume
contains three distinct styles of character sketch : the eulogistic,
the satirical and the humorous. But, among variations of detail,
the whole series presents a unity not inconsistent with cooperation:
the review of society from the experienced courtier's point of
view. In the first place, we have a number of commendatory
portraits, which, unlike Hall's, are not spiritual studies, but
examples of how 'a worthy commander in the warres' would act
who knows the hazard of battle, never pardons a mistake in the
field and despises calumny. Or, it is a model of 'A noble and
retired house-keeper' (landed gentleman), still cherishing a spirit
of old-fashioned hospitality in a country seat whose Gothic archi-
tecture will ‘outlast much of our new fantasticall building. Or,
best of all, a 'franklin,' who withstands the modern scramble for
## p. 339 (#361) ############################################
>
The Overbury Characters 339
wealth, never goes to law, does not evict tenants to enclose pastures
and, despite the puritans, would approve of king James's per-
mission' for dancing in the churchyard after evensong. Or, lastly,
'An excellent actor,' one of the earliest and most successful
attempts to place that profession among the fine arts, in the
teeth of calumny.
But class spirit becomes more evident in the satirical portrait.
A series of sketches expose, with the bitterest caricature, the
shifts and antics of the upstart courtier: his meanness, servility
and sordid materialism. Even The Dissembler' is no longer a
mere transgressor against good faith, but a diplomatist who ‘baits
craft with humility. . . and of the humours of men weaves a net for
occasion. When character beyond the pale of the court is studied,
it is the obstinate narrowness, the hostility to the refinements of a
liberal education, among the inns of court, the university or the
country gentry, which are emphasised? This bias is best illustrated
by the character of 'An hypocrite,' which begins with an analysis
of the type on broad lines, but soon parrows into a pamphleteering
attack on the puritan, who condemns the culture of the age as
'vaine ostentation,' revolts against all authority of church or king
and yet exacts not only maintenance and obedience but even
admiration from the sect over which he tyrannises.
These sketches and descriptions follow the Theophrastian tech-
nique, but the style is highly coloured by a conversational element.
