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description, in the art of representing events and objects with an intensity that makes them visible and tangible. He describes to the eye, and communicates to the airy General char- conceptions of allegory the splendour and vivacity of visible objects. He has the exhaustless fertility of Titian, with something of the same voluptuous richness of colour. Among his other poems, the most important are Mother Hubbard's Tale (in the Complaints of 1591); Minor poems. his famous elegies, Daphnaida and Astrophel, the first on the wife of his friend Arthur Gorges, the second on Sir Philip Sidney; all his sonnets, and, above all, the magnificent Epithalamion, one of the richest and most chaste marriagehymns in all literature, full of warmth, dignity, intense passion, and noble elevation and purity of sentiment. Here, too, as well as in innumerable passages of The Faery Queen, we see the influence of the lofty and abstract philosophical idea of the identity between Beauty and Virtue, which Spenser found in his Platonic studies.

SIDNEY

§ 9. The name of SIR PHILIP SIDNEY occurs so frequently in the literary history of the age, and had so powerful an influence upon the intellectual progress of his time, that SIR PHILIP any notice of the period necessarily demands some (1554-1586). allusion to his life. He was the son of Sir Henry Sidney of Penshurst in Kent, and, on his mother's side, nephew of Robert Dudley, the famous Earl of Leicester. His father held many honourable offices under the Crown, and made his mark in history as Lord Deputy of Ireland Life. from 1565 to 1571 and 1575 to 1578. While he was Lord President of Wales, in 1564, he sent his son to Shrewsbury School. In 1568, the boy passed from Shrewsbury to Christ Church, Oxford. It is hardly necessary to give any detailed account of his career as a courtier and diplomatist, which lasted from 1572 till his death in 1586. He united in his own person almost all the most fascinating qualities, whether natural or acquired-nobility of birth, beauty of person, bravery, generosity, learning, and courtesy, and he has been reckoned ever since as the beau idéal of the courtier, soldier, and scholar. His most abiding intellectual impressions seem to have been derived from his friendship with Hubert Languet, a distinguished Huguenot scholar whom he met at Frankfort in 1573. Although much concerned with politics, his real interest lay in the direction of letters, and his high position at Court gave him the headship of that literary coterie of which both Gabriel Harvey and Spenser were members. Owing partly to a quarrel on a point of etiquette with the Earl of Oxford, who was also at the head of a literary clique, and partly to his openly expressed objections to the Queen's proposed marriage with the Duke of Anjou, afterwards Henry III of France, Sidney vanished from Court in 1580, and retired to Wilton, near Salisbury, the seat of his brother-in-law, Lord Pembroke.

Here he wrote the Arcadia. But in the autumn of the year he went back to Court, and, in 1581, sat in Parliament for his county. In 1583, he was made co-Master of the Ordnance with his uncle, the Earl of Warwick, and married Frances, daughter of the Secretary Walsingham. At this time he took a great interest in the American colonies, and it was in order to prevent him from going too far afield that Elizabeth, as Protectress of the Netherlands, appointed him, in 1585, Governor of Flushing. He proved of the utmost aid to the Commanderin-Chief, his uncle Leicester; but was seriously wounded in an engagement with a Spanish troop at Zutphen, and died of his hurt at Arnhem on the 17th of October, 1586.

importance

"Arcadia"

His importance as the leader of a literary party and a patron of letters is shown by the number of books which were dedicated to him by well-known men of the day-not only Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, but Hakluyt's Voy- Literary ages (1582), among others. The Italian philosopher, of Sidney. Giordano Bruno, inscribed two books to him. In fact, his position, at the earliest of ages, was one of the most enviable even in a day when men reaped honours quickly. His own contribution to literature is small, and chiefly belongs, one may suppose, to the year of his exile from Court. The prose romance, Arcadia, posthumously published, was regarded, in his own age, as a perfect manual of The courtesy and refined ingenuity; and is certainly (1590). one of the most interesting monuments of Elizabethan literature, containing as it does so many obligations to the foreign pastoral writers and early Italian novelists, and furnishing so many more to the great school of dramatists immediately subsequent. Sidney's most thorough critics agree that his romance was founded upon the study of the Arcadia (1504) of the Neapolitan Sannazzaro, and the Diana Enamorada (1542) of the Portuguese Jorge de Montemayor, and therefore may be traced back to the parentage of Boccaccio. The pastoral note suggested by the title is not, however, indicative of the whole spirit of the romance, which, as one might expect from the typical courtier of his day, is full of incidents of quite another complexion. Amid the idyllic scenery of Arcadia and the political circumstances of the Spartan commonwealth we have chivalrous knights and pages and tournaments; and if, on the one hand, Sidney was indebted to the pastoral writers, his whole education, on the other, had been modelled upon that famous manual of gentlemanlike accomplishments, the Cortegiano of the Milanese Castiglione. In the style of the Arcadia there is a perpetual trace of the love of antithesis and the other modish affectations of the day which Shakespeare laughed out of fashion; but although Sidney was closely connected with pedants like Harvey, of whom it is impossible to say much good, his literary position was in strong contrast to the prevailing Euphuism of the age. His prose and poetry

H 2

are artificial and Italianised, but their faults are their own, and they are not given over to those ingenious and farfetched conceits which, much about the same time, made their appearance in England under Lyly and in Spain under Guevara and Luis de Gongora. In the poetry which occurs at regular intervals throughout the Arcadia there is perhaps less of the true Sidneian ring than in the one hundred Sidney's and ten sonnets known as Astrophel and Stella. It sonnets. has ordinarily been supposed that this collection is the result of a real passion which Sidney entertained for Lady Penelope Devereux, the daughter of his friend Lord Essex. This lady married Lord Rich in 1581; in 1604 she was divorced from him and married the Earl of Devonshire. That Lady Rich was the Stella of the sonnets there is no reason to doubt that Sidney wrote as a despairing lover is quite at variance with the artificial spirit and general mechanism of the poems. They are not a "human document "; they are a brilliant and passionate exercise in sonnet-writing, in which passion never gets the better of art. They display the influence of Petrarch just as the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey bear its obvious hall-mark; but their skill in the management of words, in the dressing of simple and even commonplace thoughts in a striking garb, is far more profound; they stand midway between the first efforts of those early sonneteers and the perfection of Shakespeare, side by side with the not dissimilar Amoretti of Spenser. Beside these works Sidney wrote the small but important Apology for Poetry, posthumously published in 1595, and known from 1598 as the Defence of Poesy, in which he strove to show that the pleasures to be derived from imaginative literature are powerful aids, not only to the acquisition of knowledge, but to the cultivation of virtue. This book was intended as a temperate reply to the fanatical opponents of poetry and the drama, and more especially as a rebuke to Stephen Gosson, who had dedicated his School of Abuse (1579) to Sidney. The moral tone of all his work was in accordance with his spirit of practical chivalry.

§ 10. Spenser and Sidney are at the head of their epoch. Of the younger men, the more immediate contemporaries of Shakespeare, whose lives and work extend into the The Jacobean reign of James I, there is rather less to say. None poets. of them attain the highest rank, and yet the body of work which they produced is scholarly and dignified, and marked by a charming lyric skill.

(i.) SAMUEL DANIEL belonged to the Sidneian literary clique. He was born, it is probable, near Taunton, was educated at

SAMUEL

DANIEL
(1562-1619).

Magdalen Hall, Oxford, and, in process of time, found patrons and was well received at Court. From 1599 till his death in 1619 he is said, without much foundation, to have succeeded to Spenser's pension as royal poet, a position which at this time was not

strictly official; he wrote masques for performance at Court, and held certain sinecures under James I and Anne of Denmark. He died at Beckington, near Frome Selwood, in 1619. His life was therefore very tranquil and happy, and he had the good fortune to join to his talents a regularity of conduct which was, in the poets and playwrights of those days, sufficiently rare, and must have won him general respect. His writings are tolerably voluminous, and their vigour of thought and dignified evenness of expression, with their debt to classical reading and to the Italianism of Sidney and Spenser, gives them their peculiar rarity of flavour. Daniel's most celebrated work was his History of the Civil Wars, which appeared at intervals from 1595 to 1609, and is a historical poem dealing with the Wars of the Roses, in the motley style of narrative and moral meditation brought into fashion by The Mirror for Magistrates. Daniel's poem is in eight books, and is written in eight-line stanzas. As might be expected, his talents struggle in vain against the prosaic nature of his subject; for he clings closely to the facts of history, and his attempts at enlivening them are few and far between, although he is not without his moments of pathos and vigorous description. His language is extraordinarily clear, pure, and intelligible; and, considering the tendency of the school to which he belonged, conveys a suggestion of genius. A very notable instance of this is seen in the lyric called Ulysses and the Siren (1605), with which Percy's Reliques made people familiar long before Daniel's place in literature was rediscovered. The first collected edition which bore the title of his works was published in 1601; but, in 1592, his book of sonnets, called Delia, had appeared, marking his connection with the regular school of sonneteers. 1594, his first tragedy, Cleopatra, came out, and, eleven years later, was followed by another, Philotas; these are of the grave Senecan order, like Lord Brooke's Mustapha and Alaham. Among his other works, one may mention the historical poem called The Complaint of Rosamond (1592), his prose Defence of Rhyme (1602), and History of England (1612-17), and his various masques. Altogether, he must be reckoned among the most accomplished writers of his age.

DRAYTON

In

(ii.) There is some similarity between the work of Daniel and that of MICHAEL DRAYTON, who was born at Hartshill in Warwickshire, and is buried in Westminster Abbey. Very little is known of him beyond the voluminous MICHAEL work which he left behind. His longest and most (1563-1631). celebrated productions were the topographical and descriptive poem called Polyolbion (1613-22), in thirty cantos, which was the work of his later life; the historical poem of The Barons' Wars (1603), originally called by the outlandish name of Mortimeriàdos (1596); England's Heroical Epistles (1597); the famous ballad of The Battle of Agincourt, first published in the Poems of 1605; The Muses' Elysium (1630);

and the fairy fancies of Nymphidia (1627). In 1593 he brought out a book of pastorals called Idea, or The Shepherd's Garland, and in 1594 an Idea's Mirror, containing that tribute to the sonnet-form without which no Elizabethan poet's work could

olbion."

Drayton's other work.

be complete. His masterpiece is, without doubt, The "Poly Polyolbion, which is a minute poetical_itinerary of England and Wales. Drayton's affectionate patriotism has thus enumerated-county by county, village by village, hill by hill, and rivulet by rivulet-the whole surface of his native land, enlivening his work as he goes along with immense stores of picturesque legend and the richest profusion of allegory. The poem is composed in the long-rhymed verse of twelve syllables, and is, in its design and execution, absolutely unique in literature. The notes attached to this work, in which Drayton was assisted by Selden, “that gulf of learning," are a wonderful mass of curious erudition. Drayton has described the country with the painful accuracy of the topographer and the enthusiasm of the poet; and the Polyolbion must ever remain a monument of industry, and, in spite of its obvious drawbacks, of poetical skill. The Barons' Wars may be favourably compared with Daniel's poem on the Wars of the Roses. It is written in the eight-lined stanza of Ariosto, which Drayton, in his preface, selects as the most perfect and harmonious. The result cannot be said to be of overwhelming interest; but its merits and defects, side by side with those of Daniel's production, are rather to Drayton's advantage. The period treated is the reign of Edward II. The Heroical Epistles are supposed to be written by illustrious and unfortunate personages in English history to the objects of their love. They are therefore a kind of adaptation of Ovid's plan in the Heroides, and naturally take the reader's mind forward to Pope's Eloisa to Abelard. Drayton's pastoral poetry is very little inferior to that of any of his contemporaries, not even excepting Spenser himself; while, in his fairy poems, he has never been surpassed. In the series entitled The Muses' Elysium, consisting of a series of nine idylls, or, to use his own word, Nymphals, and above all, in the exquisite little mock-heroic poem of Nymphidia, everything that is most delicate, quaint, and fantastic in fairy mythology-a form of superstition very characteristic of Great Britain-is accumulated and handled with a consummate felicity. The whole poem of Nymphidia is a gem, and is almost equalled by the Epithalamion, in the eighth Nymphal, on the marriage of “our Tita to a noble Fay." It is interesting to trace the use made of these graceful superstitions in A Midsummer-Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shakespeare was a native of Drayton's county.

(iii.) A good example of the vigour and versatility of the age, founded on solid and extensive acquirements, is to be found in

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