DAVIES

"Nosce

chestra."

the poems of SIR JOHN DAVIES, a learned lawyer and statesman, and Attorney General for Ireland. He has left two works of unusual merit and originality, on subjects apparently so widely different that their juxtaposition looks like a ludicrous paradox. The subject of one of these, SIR JOHN Nosce Teipsum (1599), is the immortality of the (1569?-1626). soul; of the other, Orchestra (1594), the art of dancing-not, indeed, the frivolous science of the jig and coranto, but the rhythmical standard to which all the motions of our life, in Davies' opinion, should be adjusted. Davies' style was pure and masculine; his versifica- Teipsum" tion was graceful and melodious; and considering and "Orthe nature of its subject, Nosce Teipsum is really a very successful poem. Orchestra, in its turn, is dignified by a singular amount of learned and classical allusions. Hallam gave great praise to the Nosce Teipsum. "Very few," he said, "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." The metre of the poem is the four-lined heroic stanza, which was afterwards adopted by Sir William D'Avenant for his Gondibert, and borrowed in turn by Dryden for the Annus Mirabilis. The Orchestra is composed in a peculiarly constructed stanza of seven lines, extremely well adapted to express the ever-varying rhythm of those dancing movements which, by a thousand ingenious analogies, the poet traces through all nature. Davies also wrote a series of acrostics in honour of Elizabeth which he called Astræa, and a book called A Discovery of the Causes of the Irish Discontent (1612), dealing with a subject which he was peculiarly fitted to handle.

(iv.) The general admiration of his contemporaries placed the genius of John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, in one of the foremost places among the men of letters of his day. Modern criticism, however, has so many dif- JOHN DONNE (1573-1631). ferent opinions to give on the subject, and Donne's modern admirers have said so much of him that is extravagant, that a little depreciation is perhaps justifiable. The true story of his life and the strange paradox of his character, which was unsuspected by his biographer, Izaak Walton, have been at length revealed (1899) by the efforts of Mr. Edmund Gosse and Dr. Jessopp. In his youth Donne was remarkable for his wit and gaiety; he seems to have embraced several professions, and to have drunk deeply of pleasure. His extraordinary accomplishments made him another Pico della Mirandola or Admirable Crichton. When entering upon his career in the public service, as secretary to the Lord Keeper Egerton, he made a secret marriage with a lady whom he had long ardently loved, a daughter of Sir George More and niece of Lady Egerton. The violent displeasure of her family afterwards involved him in serious persecution. In later life,

under the influence of deep religious conviction, he took Holy Orders (1615), and, as Dean of St. Paul's (1621), became as remarkable for his intense piety as he had been for his gallantries and escapades. His writings are very voluminous, and consist of love-verses, epigrams, elegies, and of those satires on which, in spite of the declarations of his more intimate admirers, his fame is chiefly built. His sermons, with their heightened, ponderous style, their long periods, and their wealth of intricate allusion, are as remarkable, in their way, as his poetry. As an amatory poet, Donne's although his imagination is voluptuous and even style. sensual, Donne has very rightly been placed by Johnson among those poets whom he calls metaphysicalwriters, that is to say, in whom the intellectual faculty obtains an enormous supremacy over sentiment and feeling. Donne is always on the watch for unexpected and ingenious analogies; an idea is racked into every conceivable distortion; the most remote comparisons are discovered; the most obscure recesses of historical and scientific allusion are ransacked to furnish -sometimes only to shadow forth-illustrations which no reader could possibly suggest to himself. The effect of all this upon the reader is curious: he is at once astonished and, at the same time, ashamed to see these strained postures --the clever but puerile conjuror's antics. It is evident that, in this cultivation of all that is odd, unexpected, and unnatural, the poet becomes perfectly indifferent to the natural graces of emotion in its more simple forms; and, in his incessant search after epigrammatic turns of thought, cares very little whether reason, taste, and propriety be violated or not. Donne's versification is singularly harsh and tuneless; his command of form is very slight; and the contrast between the far-fetched ingenuity of his thought and the ruggedness with which he expresses it adds to the peculiarity of the effect upon the mind of the reader. Nevertheless, there are passages in which a single phrase of two or three words redeems a vast amount of obscurity and conceit, and justifies for the moment that hyperbolic admiration which these poems have received. In Donne's seven Satires and his Epistles to his friends we naturally find less of this portentous employment of intellect to a rather insignificant end, for the nature of satires and epistles implies that they are written in a more easy and colloquial strain; and Donne occasionally, and happily, adapted the suggestions of Persius, his chief model, to the manners of his own time and country. His works were not published, so far as we know, till 1633, but they found, in after times, many admirers; and, even before our own century developed a certain enthusiasm for the lyric Dean, Pope had translated some of the satires into the elegant language of his own time, under the somewhat invidious title of "The Satires of Dr. John Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, versified."

BISHOP HALL

(1574-1656).

Hall's

satires.
•

(v.) The Latin models of satire, which were to be applied immortally to English verse by Dryden and Pope, were first adopted -at least in print-by the eminent JOSEPH HALL, Bishop of Norwich. This very distinguished ornament of early Puritan theology was born at Bristow Park, near Ashby-de-la-Zouch. He became a fellow of the Puritan college of Emmanuel at Cambridge, then very recently founded, and, taking Holy Orders, became, in process of time, a canon in St. Peter's church at Wolverhampton. He held in succession the sees of Exeter (1627) and Norwich (1641), and, as a prelate, was remarkable for his learning, dignity, and piety. He was a member of the Synod of Dort, and, in his general theological attitude, was opposed to the Laudian school of thought; but, politically, he held to the King's side, and was, in consequence, deprived of his see. The heroic resignation with which he supported poverty and persecution is a matter of history. He died during the Commonwealth in the suburbs of Norwich. With his theological work, which belongs to the Caroline period of literature, and is somewhat bald in its style, we have here nothing to do. His satires are the work of a very young man, and definitely belong to the Elizabethan era, having been written while he was a student at Cambridge. They form a complete collection of six books, under the title Virgidemiarum (ie. a harvest or collection of rods, modified from the similar term Vindemiarum, i.e. vintage). They were not, however, all published at the same time. The first three books, quaintly entitled by their author Toothless Satires, appeared in 1597; the other three, designated Biting Satires, a year later. Some of them attack the vices and affectations of literature, while others are of a more general moral application. They are certainly very clever and vivacious; but Hall dealt his blows rather too liberally and, for so young a man, with inordinate presumption. As curious pictures of the manners and society of the day, they are very interesting in themselves, and throw frequent light upon obscure passages of contemporary drama. Hall, whose chief model, like Donne's and Marston's, was Persius, often employs a peculiar artifice which gives additional force to the piquancy of his satire-viz. by making his secondary allusions or illustrations themselves satirical. Some of these satires are extremely short, occasionally consisting of only a few lines. Hall's versification is always easy and often elegant; his style is at once concise and conversational, and is more readable than Donne's. Hall's work should be compared with the inferior satires of the dramatist John Marston, of whom we shall say something in a succeeding chapter.

PHINEAS

§ 11. Space will permit only a rapid allusion to two admirable secondary poets of this vigorous and variously endowed era. PHINEAS FLETCHER (1582-1650) and and GILES GILES FLETCHER (d. 1623) were brothers, both Cam- FLETCHER,

bridge men, and both in Holy Orders. Giles was at Trinity College, and held the living of Alderton in Suffolk; Phineas was at King's College, and was rector of Hilgay, near Downham Market. Both were followers and imitators of the great master of allegory, Spenser, and in the work of both we see traces of Spenser's rich and musical diction as well as of his lofty and philosophical tone. Giles' work is a poem in four cantos, called Christ's Victory and Triumph (1610): Phineas produced a far more curious poem called The Purple Island (1633), a minute description of the human body, with all its anatomical details, followed by an equally searching delineation of the intellectual faculties. The names of the Fletchers are only two out of many, and a short account of some of the lesser poets will be found in the notes immediately following. It is difficult to select from the poetry of an age which was instinct with poetry of the highest kind-an age whose study to the literary student is a revelation of inexhaustible wonders.

NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

A. THE MIRROR FOR
MAGISTRATES (1559).

The history of this work, which is the most important poem in English literature between Surrey and Spenser and was very popular in its day, deserves a few words. Lydgate's Falls of Princes was in great demand down to the end of Mary's reign, not because of its literary merits, but as a manual of history and morality; and The Mirror for Magistrates was projected to supply a similar series of stories from English history, which Lydgate's original, Boccaccio, had neglected. The idea was probably the publisher's: the editor seems to have been WILLIAM BALDWIN, an Oxford man, who, in 1549, had dedicated a metrical version of Solomon's Song to Edward VI, and had been stage-manager of the Court interludes. Baldwin, about 1557, brought together a group of poets for his work, the chief of whom was THOMAS SACKVILLE, afterwards Lord Buckhurst. We have already said something of the part which this illustrious person took in the Mirror; his work so eminently constitutes the value of the book from its purely literary side, that subsequent editors have,

His

with no sufficient reason, assigned
the idea of the work to him. The
publication of the poems was for some
time hindered by the Chancellor,
Bishop Gardiner, who appears, as
censor, to have seen some danger
hidden in Sackville's contribution,
and so the first edition did not
appear till 1559. Sackville's poems
were not included in this. Baldwin
wove a kind of framework round the
stories, representing the shades of
the unfortunate celebrities as com-
plaining to the poet, and each story
thus forms part of a whole.
chief helper was GEOrge Ferrers
(d. 1579), a Cambridge Bachelor of
Law and then member of Parliament
for Brackley, who had been, like
Baldwin, a stage-manager at Court
entertainments, and was Lord of
Misrule at the royal revels held at
Greenwich in 1553. The other poets
were four in number, the best known
among them being Phaër, the trans-
lator of Virgil. The material of the
stories was taken chiefly from the
newly published chronicles of Fab-
yan and Hall; and the wars of York
and Lancaster were the chief re-
source of the poets.

In 1563, when the danger of another prohibition seemed unlikely, Baldwin brought out a second and