" 1576.-The first Miscellany to follow Tottel's was The Paradise of Dainty Devices, published by the printer Disle. Sir Egerton Brydges, who edited it for The British Biog-judges of Mary Queen of Scots. rapher, said, "In the subject of these poems there is too little variety, as they deal very generally in the commonplaces of ethics, such as the fickleness and caprices of love, the falsehood and instability of friendship, and the vanity of all human pleasures. But many of these are often expressed with a vigour that would do credit to any era. But, while the poems are grave and didactic, the lyric influence of Surrey and Wyatt, with all that that influence included, is to be seen in them. The chief contributor, and, it may be, the chief person consulted as to the framing of this collection-although it did not appear till ten years after his death-was RICHARD EDWARDS (circ. 1523-1566), a Somerset man, educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and, in 1561, appointed Master of the Children of the Royal Chapel. He was a poor poet, and his reputation is perhaps more intimately connected with the growth of the drama (see p. 155); but in The Paradise of Dainty Devices, we find one song of his, Amantium Ira"The falling-out of faithful friends renewing is of love"-which is one of the most lovely of English lyrics. Some poems by Lord Vaux, who, it will be remembered, had been represented in Tottel's collection, were inserted in this anthology: he wrote in a grave and religious vein, for the unstable nature of human desires seems to have impressed him much, as it impressed Sackville and the other authors of The Mirror for Magistrates. The writer who holds the third place in this Miscellany is WILLIAM HUNNIS, (d. 1597), a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and the author of some moral and religious poems printed separately and at various times. arbiter at Court, and headed a clique in opposition to the Earl of Leicester and Sir Philip Sidney. He sat as special commissioner among the 1578.-The Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions, which was collected by one THOMAS PROCTOR, is, for the most part, an affected experiment in alliteration, with hardly a redeeming feature. Yet, even here, we find the original version of the song, "Willow, willow," which forms the keynote of not the least pathetic scene in Shakespeare. 1584. CLEMENT ROBINSON'S Miscellany, A Handful of Pleas ant Delights, is, like the Gorgeous Gallery, an essay in Euphuism. Between these two had appeared Lyly's two romances of Euphues; and, consequently, in this and succeeding Miscellanies, we trace the development of a new influence in poetry. A fourth writer, who, in the Paradise, is reflective and devotional, is EDWARD DE VERE, Earl of Oxford (1550-1604), a desultory poet and epigrammatist. He was, as has been mentioned in the text, a literary 1593.-The Phanix Nest, edited by R. S. of the Inner Temple, may be bracketed with 1600.-England's Helicon, a Miscellany of pastoral poetry, planned by JOHN BODENHAM, and edited by A. B." an anonymous " Both these last are, in their style and general authorship, very similar. NICHOLAS BRETON (1545 ?-1626 ?), whose work appears in both, was a very voluminous author. His work, extending over a long period, from about 1577 to 1626, shows the trace of almost every literary influence of the Elizabethan age, from the Italianism of Surrey to the religious enthusiasm which reached its highwater mark in Crashaw. He was a friend of Sidney, and composed an elegy, Amoris Lachrimæ, upon him. His own best poem is pastoral, and bears the not very original title of The Passionate Shepherd (1604). THOMAS LODGE (d. 1625) was, like Breton, represented in both books. His father had been Lord Mayor of London; he himself was at Merchant Taylors' School and Trinity College, Oxford. Hardly any writer of the age was so thorough a devotee of miscellaneous literature. He wrote voluminously between 1579 and 1596-as dramatist, poet, pam. phleteer, and Euphuistic novelist. Ten of his poems are contained in England's Helicon, and other songs and madrigals are scattered throughout his romances. He had a great sense of style, and his affectations, although remarkable, are too well meditated to be ridiculous. As a novelist, he has the honour of having given, in his Rosalynde: Euphues' Golden Legacy (1590), the plot of As you Like It to Shakespeare; and takes rank on his own account among the founders of English prose fiction. His dramatic work is by no means conspicuous; but it is interesting to note that he was Greene's partner in A Looking Glass for London (1594). Among the remaining writers who are represented in England's Helicon, are Barnfield, Sidney, and Robert Greene. But probably the most celebrated poems in the collection are Marlowe's pastoral invitation, "Come live with me and be my love," and the matter-of-fact rejoinder attributed to Ralegh. 1600.-England's Parnassus, edited by R. A.-of this custom of anonymity the dedication of Shakespeare's Sonnets is an example which will occur to everyone-was, for the most part, not a Miscellany of original poetry, but a selection from the poems of the best authors of the time. R. A. is generally supposed to be one ROBERT ALLOTT. 1602.-The last important Miscellany is the Poetical Rhapsody, which was edited by FRANCIS DAVISON (1575?-1618?), son of the Secretary, William Davison. He but, himself contributed to it, and his fellow-writers were mostly courtiers like himself, representing the school of Sidney. Sidney, who had been dead for sixteen years, is represented by two pastorals: of the poets alive at the time, the most illustrious is SIR EDWARD DYER (d. 1607), a Somerset man, and a sometime student at Oxford, who had a rather chequered career at Court. His poetry is scanty, and consists of a number of detached lyrics, of which the best known is the splendid, "My mind to me a kingdom is," first published in 1588. | SIR HENRY WOTTON (1568-1639), whose diplomatic career lasted for many years, also appears among Davison's band of poets. Wotton was a very reputable scholar, but his literary lustre is chiefly reflected from his associates, and from the life which Izaak Walton prefixed to the Reliquie Wottoniana (1651). Towards the end of his life he became Provost of Eton, and took deacon's orders. Beside the poems and prose in the Reliquiæ, he wrote a book on the Elements of Architecture, which was long held in great esteem. The student who is desirous of gaining a nearer acquaintance with the Elizabethan lyric should refer to Collier's Seven English Miscellanies (1867) and Mr. A. H. Bullen's collections of Lyrics from Elisabethan Song-Books. (2.) The Sonneteers. The English Sonnet demands a place to itself in any history of English literature, not only because it represents a peculiar and important division of poetical writing, but because almost every great poet of the day strove to attain special excellence as a sonnet-writer; because it was chiefly through the sonnets of Wyatt and Surrey that the spirit of the Italian Renaissance entered English poetry; and because this branch of art culminates in the finest flower of Elizabethan verse, the Sonnets of Shakespeare. We have already referred to many of these books of sonnets, and it will be best, for our purpose here, to give a chronological list of them, adding short biographical notes where the authors have not been mentioned already. 1557.-The bulk of Wyatt's and Surrey's sonnets appeared in Tottel's Miscellany. 1582.-THOMAS WATSON (circ. 1557-1592) brought out a collection of sonnets, the Hecatompathia, or Passionate Century of Love, which he dedicated to Lord Oxford. Watson was an Oxford scholar of much learning, and prefixed to each of his sonnets a quaint and pedantic prose commentary, in which he candidly indicates the source from which he has derived (and borrowed) his inspiration. Watson has received some harsh criticism because his sonnets are so obviously exercises in metre rather than the fruits of passion. In spite, however, of a rare crudity and affectation, Watson's collection is not to be despised. The sonnets are to be attributed, not so much to the imitation of Wyatt and Surrey, as to Watson's own devotion to Petrarch, whom he had translated| into Latin a few years before, and to a very wide acquaintance with Latin, Greek, and Italian poets. The passion of sonneteers cannot always be proved to be genuine, and, on this count, Watson may be acquitted from blame. He need not, on the other hand, have taken such pains to be artificial. In 1593, soon after his death, another volume of sonnets, which he had already circulated in manuscript, was brought out. This, The Tears of Fancy, although boasting no originality, is, as Professor Saintsbury points out (Hist. of Eliz. Literature, p. 107), indebted at least to Sidney, whose sonnets had appeared since the Hecatompathia. 1591. The real inauguration of the Elizabethan sonnet is SIR PHILIP SIDNEY'S Astrophel and Stella, containing 108 poems (see p. 100). This was followed immediately by a tremendous crop of sonnet-books. 1592. The great sonnet-book of this year was the first edition of SAMUEL DANIEL'S Delia (see p. 101), the first of the long series of books called by the fictitious name of the poet's mistress-if he really had one. A more complete edition was published in 1594. In the end of 1592 HENRY CONSTABLE'S (1562-1613) Diana appeared for the first time as the nucleus of a book full of miscellaneous and anonymous sonnets. The complete edition of Diana, like that of Delia, belongs to 1594. Constable was the son of Sir Robert Constable of Newark, and was a member of St. John's College, Cambridge. He was deeply engaged in the numerous plots which were formed during Elizabeth's reign to restore England to the Roman obedience, and, in James I's time, his zeal landed him in the Tower. His sonnet work is augmented by a series addressed to noble ladies who admired his poems, and by sixteen Spiritual Sonnets to the Honour of God and His Saints; these were not, however, published till the present century. 1593.-BARNABE BARNES' (1569?1609) Parthenophil and Parthenophe. Of the author little is known save that his father was Richard Barnes, Bishop of Durham, that he was for some time at Brasenose College, Oxford, and that in 1591 he was in Normandy with Essex. As a member of Gabriel Harvey's clique, he dealt unduly in hyperbolical mannerisms, and was able to descend to sheer nonsense. But he was capable also of excellent poetry in a hypersensuous vein, and few sonneteers, short of Shakespeare, gave so much life and energy to their verse. Like so many other poets at the end of the sixteenth century, he turned his attention to religious verse, and, in 1595, published his Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets, which he dedicated to Tobias Matthew, then recently appointed Bishop of Durham and afterwards Archbishop of York. The Licia of GILES FLETCHER (1549?-1611), the father of Phineas and Giles Fletcher (see p. 105), followed a few months later, and the Phillis of THOMAS LODGE (see above, under the "Miscellanies"), a remarkable and excellent book of sonnets, belongs also to this year. 1594-In addition to the definitive editions of Delia and Diana, this year saw the appearance of Drayton's Idea's Mirror, a sequel to Idea (1593) (see p. 102). WILLIAM PERCY'S (15751648) Calia appears, from internal evidence and what we know of its author, a son of Lord Northumberland, to have been written in admiring emulation of Barnabe Barnes. The anonymous Zepheria, of the same year, betrays a considerable debt to foreign sonneteers. And in 1594. too, the grave George Chapman (see Ch. VIII), for whom love had few charms, published ten sonnets to no less a mistress than Philosophy. 1595. RICHARD BARNFIELD (1574-1627), a member of Brasenose College, Oxford, and a country squire at Dorlestone in Staffordshire, published his poem Cynthia in this year, and added to it twenty sonnets to Ganymede, whose subject reminds one of the earlier portion of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Barnfield is best known as the author of "As it fell upon a day," which is part of the pseudo-Shakespearean cycle of songs and sonnets called The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). The poem was reprinted in England's Helicon under the signature "Ignoto.' " The remaining sonnets of 1595 are Spenser's Amoretti, and the anonymous books called Emaricdulfe (by E. C.) and Alcilia (by J. C.) Akcilia contains sonnets which have a merely nominal claim to the title; but the word "sonnet' was freely used at this time, and was applied by Lord Vaux as a sub-title to his " I lothe that I did love," which is a very distant cousin to the sonnet. 1595, according to Mr. Sidney Lee (Life of Shakespeare, p. 436), is the probable year of Sir John Davies' nine "Gulling sonnets," in which the current type of sonnet is ridiculed. These were not published. For other details of Sir John, see p. 103. 1596.-BARTHOLOMEW GRIFFIN, RICHARD LYNCH, and WILLIAM SMITH, all three obscure and wellnigh dateless poets, came forward respectively with Fidessa, Diella, and Chloris. There is little to be said to the praise of these be-sonneted ladies, whose generation was now growing a little old. ROBERT TOFTE'S (d. 1620) Laura, of 1597, almost exhausts the series. A few belated volumes followed, chief among which are the Aurora (1637) of SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER, and the Calica of SIR FULKE GREVILLE (see p. 248). The date of publication of these is, however, no clue to their date of authorship. Spenser, for example, had written his sonnets long before they appeared; and Shakespeare's were not published till 1609.3 This short chronicle by no means exhausts the tale of Elizabethan sonnet writers. Their name is legion, and they wrote upon all manner of subjects other than the merely factitious subject of love. In bringing their names together, I have largely availed myself of the appendix to Mr. Sidney Lee's recently published Life of Shakespeare. Mr. Lee has gone, more thoroughly than any previous writer, into the question of the influence which was exercised by contemporary French sonneteers on these writers. The French sonnet has, indeed, the start of its English sister, and the great name of Ronsard (1524-1585), to say nothing of his prolific friends and followers, has doubtless a place in the vocabulary of our sonneteers; but the quickening force of the sonnet and the moulder of its spirit, apart from its form, is Petrarch. The sonnet, more vitally than anything else, displays the Italian side of Elizabethan art. (3.) The Translators. If the sonnet and lyric forms of poetry represent the chief original activity of our literature in Elizabeth's reign, it must be kept in mind and we have already hinted-that the strongest of all influences which made themselves felt on the age came from the revived study of the classics. The reign of Henry VIII, with its princely bishops and statesmen, had given the necessary impetus to learning in England: in that period the energies of the Universities had been directed in their proper road; and a learned class, apart from all ordinary social distinctions, had been formed. The next step lay in the transmission of classical learning to the multitude through the medium of translations. It is not at all surprising to find that almost every year of the century between 1550 and 1650 produced its quota of translations, both in poetry and prose, and that few Latin or Greek authors were, by the end of that time, left untouched. We shall have more to say of the prose translators at the end of the next chapter, while the greatest of all those who turned their authors into English verse, George Chapman, belongs more properly to the dramatists. While the prose translators were more or less illustrious, the poets were, for the most part, rather insignificant. But three of them had a very distinct influence on the poetry of their age. The study of Virgil had already produced Bishop Douglas' archaic translation and the tentative versions of Surrey. In 1558, THOMAS PHAËR (d. 1560), of whom we know little, save that he was an Oxford man, published a poetical version of seven books of the Eneid. In 1560 he died, having finished nine books, and the work was completed (1573) by THOMAS TWYNE (1543-1613). This translation is a somewhat weary piece of work, and has no suspicion of poetical beauty about it. But its importance lies in the fact that, however roughly or inadequately, it introduced Virgil to the reading public, and supplied new poets with their material. A later translation (1582) of the first four books of the Eneid by RICHARD STANYHURST (1547-1618) deserves mention for the eccentricity of its diction, extravagant and tuneless, yet sometimes not without poetry. Ovid's Metamorphoses, a treasurehouse of classical fable and allusion, were rendered into English (1567) by ARTHUR GOLDING (1536?-1605?), an uncle by marriage of Edward, Earl of Oxford. However, the most important translation of all, in view of the coming pre-eminence of the drama, was the series of plays taken from Seneca by JASPER HEYWOOD (1535-1598), a son of John Heywood, the writer of interludes (see Ch. VI). Heywood was an Oxford man, and a fellow, first of Merton, then of All Souls'; but, adhering to the Church of Rome, was deprived of his fellowship under Elizabeth, took Holy Orders, became a Jesuit, and, after risking his life in England and being sent to the Tower, died at Naples. His Senecan translations, consisting of three plays, appeared in 1559, 1560, and 1561. Here, again, we have little of real literary value. | But the stilted, verbose tragedies of Seneca were the medium through which the great principles of tragic art came to England; and, although their actual literary influence was very transitory, and the Elizabethan tragedy soon escaped from their stiff limitations, we shall nevertheless see, in a subsequent chapter, that their imitation had a definite vogue. It is certainly interesting to note that the date of Sackville and Norton's Gorboduc, that most Senecan of English tragedies, is 1561, the year in which Heywood's last translation was published. This implies, not so much the influence of Heywood upon the authors, as the popularity of his work with the public, which would make this far from lively tragedy an acceptable stage-play. Not less important than these are the group of translators who, flourishing a generation later, made the Italian poets common property. But, while Jasper Heywood and the others aided in building up the great structure of Elizabethan literature, the translators of Ariosto and Tasso only added a supplement to what had been already done. Moreover, while the classical translators reached the people and helped on the popular form of art, the drama, the Italian translators addressed themselves to a more limited audience. Spenser's Faëry Queen and Sidney's Arcadia were written for cultivated ladies and gentlemen, for nobles and courtiers; and it was to this class that Ariosto and Tasso similarly appealed. The Italian authors who caught the popular ear were, as we shall see, the prose novelists. The Petrarchist son neteers, no doubt, delighted the educated minority in England: but that all classes alike saw the beauty of Spenser's Amoretti or Daniel's Delia is impossible. While Phaer's Virgil found a large market, there were many translations no better and no worse which found no market at all, and are now forgotten. The inference is obvious. The public readily accepted even inferior translations of the classics: the cultured classes, in demanding |