Teipsum, publish.d in 1599, is written in four-lined stanzas of heroic lines, a measure which was afterwards honored by being taken as the vehicle of one of Dryden's early efforts; but Dryden borrowed it more immediately from the Gondibert of Davenant. The Orchestra is composed in a peculiarly-constructed stanza of seven lines, extremely well adapted to express the ever-varying rhythm of those dancing move ments which the poet, by a thousand ingenious analogies, traces throughout all nature.

(iv.) The unanimous admiration of contemporaries placed the genius of JOHN DONNE (1573-1631), Dean of St. Paul's, in one of the foremost places among the men of letters of his day. His life, too, full of vicissitudes, and his devotion of great and varied powers, first to scholastic study and retirement, then to the service of the state in active life, and last to the ministry of the Church, by familiarizing him with all the phases of human life, furnished his mind with rich materials for poetry of various kinds. When entering upon the career of the public service, as secretary to the Treasurer Lord Ellesmere, he made a secret marriage with the daughter of Sir George Moor, a lady whom he had long ardently loved, and the violent displeasure of whose family involved Donne in severe persecution. Though distinguished in his youth for wit and gayety, he afterwards, under deep religious conviction, embraced the clerical profession, and became as remarkable for intense piety as he had previously been for those accomplishments which had made him the Pico di Mirandola of his age. The writings of Donne are very voluminous, and consist of love verses, epigrams, elegies, and, skʊte all, satires, which latter department of his works is that by which. no is now principally remembered. As an amatory poet he has been justly classed by Johnson among the metaphysical poets-writers in whom the intellectual faculty obtains an enormous and disproportionate supremacy over sentiment and feeling. These authors are ever on the watch for unexpected and ingenious analogies; an idea is racked into every conceivable distortion; the most remote comparisons, the obscurest recesses of historical and scientific allusion, are ransacked to furnish comparisons and illustrations which no reader can suggest to himself, and which, when presented to him by the perverse ingenuity of the poet, fill him with a strange mixture of astonishment and shame, like the distortions of the posture-master or the tricks of sleight-of-hand. It is evident that in this cultivation of the odd, the unexpected, and the monstrous, the poet becomes perfectly indifferent to the natural graces and tender coloring of simple emotion; and in his incessant search after epigrammatic turns of thought, he cares very little whether reason, taste, and propriety be violated. This false taste in literaturs was at one time epidemic in Spain and Italy, from whence, in all proba

ties peculiarly deemed poetical are frequently exhibited in a considerable degree, but very few have been able to preserve a perspicuous brevity without stiffness or pedantry (allowance made for the subject and the times), in metaphysical reasoning, so successfully as Sir John Davies."-(Lit. ii. 129.)

bility, it infected English poets, who have frequently rivalled their models in ingenious absurdity. The versification of Donne is singu iarly harsh and tuneless, and the contrast between the ruggedness of his expression and the far-fetched ingenuity of his thought adds to the oddity of the effect upon the mind of the reader, by making him contrast the unnatural perversion of immense intellectual activity with the rudeness and frequent coarseness both of the ideas and the expression. In Donne's Satires, of which he wrote seven, and in his Epistles to friends, we naturally find less of this portentous abuse f intellectual legerdemain, for the nature of such compositions implies that they are written in a more easy and colloquial strain; and Donne has occasionally adapted, with great felicity, the outlines of Horace and Juvenal to the manners of his own time and country. Pope has translated some of Donne's Satires into the language of his own time, under the title of "The Satires of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, versified."

(v.) But the real founder of Satire in England, if we are to judge by the relative scope and completeness of his works in this department, was JOSEPH HALL (1574-1656), Bishop of Norwich, a man equally remarkable for the learning, dignity, and piety with which he fulfilled his pastoral functions, and the heroic resignation with which he supported poverty and persecution when deprived of them. He produced six books of Satires, under the title of Virgidemiarum (i. e. a harvest or collection of rods, a word modified from the similar term Vindemiarum, vintage), which form a complete collection, though they were not all published at the same time, the first three books, quaintly entitled by their author toothless Satires, having appeared in 1597, while a student at Cambridge; and the latter three, designated biting Satires, two years afterwards. Some of these excellent poems attack the vices and affectations of literature, and others are of a more general moral application. For the vivacity of their images, the good sense and good taste which pervade them, the abundance of their illustrations, and the ease and animation of the style, they are deserving of high admiration. Read merely as giving curious pictures of the manners and society of the day, they are very interesting in themselves, and throw frequent light on obscure passages of the contemporary drama. Hall, like Juvenal, often employs a peculiar artifice which singularly heightens the piquancy of his attacks, viz. that of making his secondary allusions or illustrations themselves satirical. Some of these satires are extremely short, occasionally consisting of only a few lines. His versi fication is always easy, and often elegant; and the language offers an admirable union of the unforced facility of ordinary conversation with the elevation and conciseness of a more elaborate style.*

§ 10. Space will permit only a rapid allusion to several secondary poets who adorned this period, so rich in variety and vigor. The two brothers, PHINEAS FLETCHER and GILES FLETCHER, who lived, approx

*To Donne and Hall should be added the name of JOHN MARSTON, the dramatic poet, as one of the chief satirists of the Elizabethan era. In 1599 h published three books of Satires, vnder the titie of The Scourge of Villainy.

imately, between the years 1584 and 1650, and who were connected by blood with their great contemporary the dramatist, produceu, the former one of those long elaborate allegorical works which had been so fashionable at the beginning of the century, and in which science called in the aid of fiction, as in the case of Davies's poem on the Immortality of the Soul. This was The Purple Island, a minute description of the human body, with all its anatomical details, which is followed by an equally searching delineation of the intellectual faculties. Giles Fletcher's work is Christ's Victory and Triumph, in which, as in his brother's production, we see evident traces of the rich and musical ciction, as well as of the lofty and philosophical tone, of the great master of allegory, Spenser. With a mere notice of the noble religious enthusiasm that prevails in the writings of CHURCHIYARD, and of the unction and truly evangelical resignation of the unfortunate Jesuit SOUTHWELL, and a word of praise to the faithful and elegant transla tion of Tasso by FAIRFAX, I must conclude the present chapter.*

*For a fuller account of these poets, see Notes and Illustrations (B).

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

A. THE MIRROUR FOR MAGISTRATES.

(See p. 72.)

The history of this work, which is the most important poem in English literature between Surrey d Spenser, and which was very popular in its day, deserves a few words. It was projected, as stated above (p. 72), by Thomas Sackville, Lord Bathurst, about the year 1557, and its plan was to give an account of all the illustrious but unfortunate characters in English history, from the conquest to the end of the fourteenth century. The poet descends, like Dante, into the infernal regions, conducted by Sorrow. Sackville, however, wrote only the Induction and the legend of the fall of the Duke of Buckingham, the vision of Richard III., and then committed the completion of the work to RICHARD BALDWYNE and GEORGE FERRERS. They were both men of learning; the former an ecclesiastic, and the author of a metrical version of Solomon's Song, which he dedicated to Edward VI.; the latter a lawyer, who sat in Parliament in the reign of Henry VIII., and who filled the office of the Lord of Misrule in the palace of Greenwich at the Christmas revels appointed by Edward VI., in 1553. Baldwyne and Ferrers called in the assistance of several other writers, among whom were Churchyard and Phayer, the translator of Virgil, who took their materials chiefly from the newly published chronicles of Fabyan and Hall. The wars of York and Lancaster were their chief resource. The work was first published in 1559; and after passing through three cditions was reprinted in 1587, with the addition of many new lines, under the conduct of JOIN HIGGINS, a clergyman, and the author of some school books, who wrote a new Induction in the octave stanza and a new series of

lives, from Albanact, the youngest son of Brutus, and the first king of Albanie, or Scotland, continued to the Emperor Caracalla. The legend of Cordelia King Lear's youngest daughter, is the most striking part of Higgins's performance. The Mirrour was recast, with new additions, in 1610, by the poet Richard Niccols. It continued to enjoy great popularity till superseded by the growing reputation of a new poetical chronicle, entitled Albion's England, published before the beginning of the reign of James I.

Warton, who has devoted considerable space to the Mirrour for Magistrates, remarks, "It is reasonable to suppose, that the publication of the Mirror for Magistrates enriched the stores, and extended the limits, of our drama. These lives are so many tragical speeches in character. They suggested scenes to Shakspeare. Some critics imagine that Historical Plays owed their origin to this collection. At least it is certain that the writers of this Mirrour were the first who made a poctical use of the English chronicles recently compiled by Fabyan, Hall, and Hollinshed, which opened a new field of subjects and events; and, I may add, produced a great revolution in the state of popular knowledge. For before those claborate and voluminous compilations appeared, the history of England which had been shut up in the Latin narratives of the monkish annalists, was unfamiliar and almost unknown to the general reader."

B. MINOR POETS IN THE REIGNS OF
ELIZABETH AND JAMES I.

It was said by Ellis that nearly one hundred names of poets belonging to the reign of Elizabeth might · enumerated, besides mary that have ha

HENRY CONSTABLE (1568 ?-1604?), was cele. brated for his sonnets, published in 1592, under the name of Diana. It is conjectured that he was the same Henry Constable who, for his zeal in the THOMAS WATSON (1560-1592), the author of some Catholic religion, was long obliged to live in a state sonnets, which have been much admired.

JOSHUA SYLVESTER (1563-1618), a merchant, SIR FULK GREVILLE, LORD BROOKE (1554who translated The Divine Weeks and Works of the 1621), a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, was made French poet Du Bartas, and obtained in his day Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a peer in 1621. the epithet of the Silver-tongued. The work went IIe died by the stab of a revengeful servant, in 1628. through seven editions, the last being published in His poems are a Treatise on Humane Learning, a 1641. It was one of Milton's early favorites. Treatise of Wars, a Treatise of Monarchy, a TreaARTHUR BROOKE (ob. 1563), the author of The tise of Religion, and an Inquisition upon Fame and

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