Prince of Tyre, parts of which were perhaps written by Shakespeare, Gower is introduced before each Act in the character of chorus, and at the opening of the play he is made to address the audience in doggerel verse as follows:

To sing a song that old was sung,
From ashes ancient Gower is come;
Assuming men's infirmities,

To glad your ear, and please your eyes.

It hath been sung at festivals,

On ember-eves and holy-ales ;

And lords and ladies in their lives

Have read it for restoratives;

The purchase is to make men glorious;

Et bonum quo antiquius eo melius.

If you, born in these latter times,

When wit's more ripe, accept my rhymes,
And that to hear an old man sing
May to your wishes pleasure bring,
I life would wish, and that I might
Waste it for you, like taper-light.

In a word, the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists regarded themselves as the lineal descendants of the poets of the fourteenth century: they made use of their materials; they inherited something of their spirit; they even reproduced features of their style. If we are to understand the motives of the finished poetical architecture of the writers of the English Renaissance we must examine the foundations on which they built.

And this fact has a strong bearing on a method of critical interpretation exactly opposite to the depreciating spirit exhibited by M. Taine, and likely to have greater influence with the readers of our own time. Within the last twenty years a school of English humanists has arisen, which seeks to explain the character of all masterpieces of literature and art by personal sympathy and intuition, or by what may be justly called the method of

appreciation." The word is one which cannot fail to recall to many of us how much has been lost to English literature by the recent deaths of two men of great distinction, Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds. By their writings they exercised a wide influence on the most cultivated part of English society; their memory is endeared to the writer of these words by many cherished associations. One of them possessed a subtle and penetrating imagination, which he used to re-embody the ideas he derived from the study of works of art and literature in historic fiction, and in forms of language peculiarly his own; the other, with a nature most keenly alive to every kind of artistic beauty, communicated his impressions to the reader in words which reflected his own enthusiasm. Both were nearly of an age; both passed away almost suddenly in the maturity of their powers; both have left behind them works on which, as on the songs of Heraclitus, "Death, the ravager of all things, will not lay his hands."

Very characteristic are the words in which Pater and Symonds define the Renaissance, the period to which each of them had chiefly directed his study.

"For us," says the former, "the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided, but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them not merely to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to divine new sources of it, new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new sources of art. Of this feeling there was a great outbreak in the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the following century."—The Renaissance, by Walter Pater, p. 3 (1877).

"In the word Renaissance, or new birth," says Symonds, "in the phenomenon of Europe arousing herself from the torpor of ten centuries, we detect a spiritual regeneration, a natural crisis, not to be explained by this or that characteristic of its evolution, but to be accepted as an instinctive effort of humanity for which at length the time was come, which had been anticipated by the throes of centuries, and in the onward progress of which we still participate. . . . In the period between 14501550, we find a sudden intellectual illumination, a spontaneous outburst of intelligence."-The Renaissance of Modern Europe, pp. 4, 5. A lecture delivered before the Sunday Lecture Society, by J. Addington Symonds (1872).

Hence it will appear that Symonds and Pater, while differing from each other widely as to the general nature, and even as to the date, of the Renaissance, agree in regarding it as a sudden and isolated movement of the human mind, which cannot be explained by the ordinary methods of historic investigation. Now, whatever be the charm of works produced by men who were able to imprint on their creation or criticism the stamp of originality, I cannot but think that such a method of interpretation, if generally adopted, must lead to a very erroneous conception of our own relations both to the Middle Ages and to the Renaissance. For there seems to be an obvious inconsistency in regarding the Renaissance as a sudden, mysterious, inexplicable movement, and in insisting at the same time that the meaning of this movement can be divined by the sympathetic intuition of modern criticism. Or, to put the case in the concrete, when a critic, with his thoughts full of the ideas, sentiments, associations, and prejudices of his age, seeks to interpret the mysterious phenomena of the remote past by mere personal sympathy, it must surely frequently happen that what he takes for a positive appreciation of historic truth

is, in reality, nothing more than an analysis of the impressions he observes in his own mind.

In this history I ask the reader to follow a longer, I think a more certain, but perhaps a less attractive road. M. Taine has said with justice that there is a certain resemblance between the work of the Middle Ages and the work of the decadence of the Roman Empire. This similarity is no more than natural, since the one period was the intellectual parent of the other; and in the same way the poetical work of the sixteenth century in England retains some of the features of the fourteenth, because the Renaissance is in touch with the Middle Ages. The business of historical criticism is to trace the stream of thought that connects age with age, and the almost imperceptible gradations which mark the advance of language and metrical harmony. By this means the transition of imagination from mediæval to modern times will appear much less abrupt and mysterious than we have been accustomed to consider it. Nor is the history of the early stages of our poetry wanting in an interest of its own. Gower, Lydgate, Occleve, and others, may be in themselves the dull folk that M. Taine finds them, but they rise into a position of some dignity when they are regarded as the pioneers of our poetry; and the reader who will have the patience to master the general character of their work will be rewarded for his labour by the fuller appreciation he will thereby bring to the study of later and greater writers.

It will be seen from the correspondence before cited that Gray would have excluded dramatic poetry from the purview of his history, and Warton expressed the same intention, though his history shows that he did not strictly abide by it. The nature of their designs made such a limitation in the scope of their work perfectly reasonable. I think, however, that, in a history which attempts to trace

the growth of imaginative life in the English nation through its poetry, it would be hardly possible to treat the subject with completeness without reference to the development of the drama. But as the history of the English theatre has been separately written by skilful hands, I shall treat of it only in a condensed form, and in so far as it illustrates the general design of this work.

3. A modern History of English Poetry must deal not only with the progress of poetical invention, but with the more technical question of the development of metrical harmony. And here I feel that a kind of apology is due to two classes of readers. First, to the philologist. I have made no special study of the science of Philology, and whatever knowledge I possess is derived from those who speak on the subject with recognised authority. The period of poetry treated in this volume has become almost the property of the philologists, and in availing myself of their labours for my own critical purposes, it may well be that I have been guilty of many errors, not, I would fain hope, of principle, but of detail. I shall be sincerely grateful to any one who will point out to me the existence of these mistakes, that I may hereafter have an opportunity of correcting them. But I have also to ask for the indulgence of the general reader, whose interest in the earlier stages of our poetry I am particularly anxious to arouse. I am well aware that men shrink with even more repugnance from archaisms of language than from obsolete modes of thought; and I can only remind the reader that a certain knowledge of the older forms of our tongue is absolutely necessary for a full appreciation of the style of our greatest writers. The amount of labour required for the purpose is, however, much less than is often supposed. In order to illustrate the progress of our poetry I have made one or two selections from Anglo-Saxon, and many from old