Italian translations, also asked for a measure of form and style with them. Harington's Ariosto and Fairfax's Tasso are not rough, haphazard versions: they are, by themselves, literary productions, attempts to give a worthy rendering of their original and to fit it to the appreciation of men of taste and learning. Ariosto and Tasso were the Italian poets most in request; their study formed the necessary corollary to the study of Spenser: they were also the most modern of the great Italians. The definitive edition of the Orlando Furioso appeared in 1532; the Gerusalemme Liberata of Tasso belongs to 1580. As the demand for Petrarch and the general custom of the sonnet grew slack, the popularity of the epic and romantic authors grew. Their influence on Milton, the greatest poet of the seventeenth century-their contribution to the stock of his imagination -is easily seen. One may remark, in this place, that the Elizabethan writers seem to have recognised little in Dante beyond his medievalism: they regarded the Divine Comedy as they regarded Westminster Abbey or Lincoln Minster, as an antiquated work of art sadly in need of Renaissance beautifying. The study of Dante, so far as England is concerned, belongs to the nineteenth century.

Sir

SIR JOHN HARINGTON (15611612) published, in 1591, the earliest translation of the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto. His father, the elder John Harington (1534-1582), was the author of some poems published in his son's collection called Nuge Antiqua, and was imprisoned by Mary in the Tower, for holding correspondence with Elizabeth. John himself was born at Kelston, near Bath. He wrote four books of epigrams and several other works. He was also, as joint executor of Frances Lady Sussex's will, connected with the founding of Sidney Sussex College, in Cambridge. His successor in the path of Italian translation was EDWARD FAIRFAX (d. 1635), a gentleman of fortune, who, in 1600, published a transENG. LIT,

lation of Tasso, with a dedication to Queen Elizabeth. This version shows a distinct advance upon Harington's Ariosto. "It has been considered," says Hallam, "as one of the earliest works, in which the obsolete English, which had not been laid aside in the days of Sackville, and which Spenser affected to preserve, gave way to a style not much differing, at least in point of single words and phrases, from that of the present day." But this praise, he adds, is equally due to Daniel, to Drayton, and to others of the later Elizabethan poets. The first five books of Tasso had been previously (1594) translated by the antiquary RICHARD CAREW (15551620). This translation, although more literal than Fairfax's, is far inferior in poetical spirit.

Yet another type of translator is seen in JOSUAH SYLVESTER (15631618), a man of Kent, who spent most of his life as a merchant in London, and died at Middelburg, as secretary to the English Merchant Venturers. Sylvester's great work was the translation (1605-6) of the French poet Du Bartas' Divine Weeks and Works, one of those inspired poems whose cosmogony is splendid, if uncritical. The original poem, La Semaine, and its sequel, La Seconde Semaine, had appeared in 1578 and 1584. This version was in great repute for many years: it went through six editions, the last of which was published in 1641: it gained its maker the epithet of " the Silver-Tongued"; and it had a great influence on the subsequent work of Milton. Sylvester also published, in 1599, a series of gratulatory sonnets, forty in number, addressed to Henry IV of France.

(4.) Other Poets.

THOMAS CHURCHYARD (1520?1604) was born at Shrewsbury, and served as a page in Surrey's household, where pages might be expected to develop into poets. Churchyarċ however, never became a past maste. of the art. Half his life and more was spent in active service under all the best commanders of the age;

I

but his enjoyment of warfare seems to have been but slight. Isaac d'Israeli described him as "one of those unfortunate men who have written poetry all their days and lived a long life to complete the misfortune.' His temperament was exceptionally gloomy, and there is very little of the cheerful note in his poetry. It may be remembered that he joined in the compilation of The Mirror for Magistrates. In most of his subsequent work he adhered to the same stiff, sombre style, introducing an autobiographical element which is sufficiently melancholy. Critics differ considerably about his place among contemporary writers; but the comparative smoothness of his verse cannot compensate for its monotony and lack of humour, or place him above a rather hardly gained position in the second class of Tudor poets.

JOHN DAVIES of Hereford (1565?1618) was a writing-master and author of miscellaneous verse. His

forte lay in the sonnet and epigram, but he fancied his own powers in religious allegory very strongly. His best work is to be found in the collections (1610-11) called Wits' Pilgrimage and The Scourge of Folly. He must not be confounded with the more eminent Sir John Davies, to whom we have alluded in the text.

HUMPHREY GIFFORD, in 1580, published a collection of songs called A Posy of Gillyflowers, which has something of value as a very distinct example of the transition from the early Tudor poetry to the full strength of the Elizabethan period. Many of Gifford's poems are semireligious.

BARNABE GOOGE (1540-1594). who has been credited with a poem in Tottel's Miscellany, was the son of a Recorder of Lincoln, and migrated from Christ's College, Cambridge, to New College, Oxford. His reputation is, of course, similar to that of Turbervile, Gascoigne, and other pioneers of Elizabethan poetry. He entered the household of Sir William Cecil, afterwards Lord Burghley. His chief work is the Eclogues, Epitaphs, and Sonnets, of 1563,

which is a considerable addition to English pastoral poetry. He also, like many of his friends, was a translator, choosing for his effort (1560-5) a Latin satire by Pier Angelo Manzoli (Marcellus Palingenius), known as The Zodiac of Life. Dr. Courthope notes: "The matter of his fifth and sixth eclogues is borrowed from the Diana Enamorada of Montemayor, which he had doubtless read during his travels in Spain; and, as far as I know, this is the first trace of the influence of Spanish romance on English poetry." Sidney, as we have seen, was indebted to Montemayor for a certain amount of his Arcadia.

SAMUEL ROWLANDS (1570?-1630) was a prolific pamphleteer during the late Tudor and the Stewart epoch. "His descriptions of contemporary follies," said the poet Campbell, "have considerable humour. think he has afforded in the story of Smug and Smith a hint to Butler'

the author of Hudibras-"for his apologue of vicarious justice, in the case of the brethren who hanged a 'poor weaver that was bedrid,' instead of the cobbler who had killed an Indian

"Not out of malice, but mere zeal,
Because he was an Infidel.""

SOUTHWELL

ROBERT (1561 ?1595) was born at Horsham St. Faith's in Norfolk, was educated at Douai, where he joined the Society of Jesus and took Holy Orders, and returned to England as a missionary in 1586. He was arrested in 1592 and executed at Tyburn in 1595, not as an accomplice in any plot, but simply as a priest of the Roman Church. His poems have a wonderful beauty of religious thought and expression, and Ben Jonson said of the famous Burning Babe, that Southwell "had so written that piece of his, that he (Jonson) would have been content to destroy many of his.' Southwell bears some resemblance to the other great and gentle Romanist poet, Richard Crashaw.

WILLIAM WARNER (1558?-1609) was a native of London, an attorney of the Common Pleas, and the author of Albion's England, first

printed in 1586, and frequently reprinted. This poem, written in the fourteen-syllable line, is a history of England from the Deluge to the reign of James I. It supplanted The Mirror for Magistrates in popular favour. The style of the work was much admired in its day, and Meres, in his Wit's Treasury, says that by Warner's pen the English tongue was "mightily enriched and gorgeously invested in rare ornaments and splendid habiliments." tales are chiefly of a "merry" cast, and the work altogether furnishes a great contrast to The Mirror for Magistrates.

(5.) Scottish Poets.

The

Although the two most important Scottish poets of the Elizabethan period belong, in point of time, to a later period, and were more nearly the contemporaries of Wither, Herrick, and Crashaw than of Spenser and Sidney, their chief work, nevertheless, consists of sonnets, and may therefore be referred to the epoch under discussion. SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER, EARL OF STIRLING (1567?-1640), published in 1637 a collection of works, called Recreations of the Muses. This contained an heroic poem called Doomsday, four tragedies founded on grave and royal themes, and a book of sonnets entitled Aurora. The fact that, so late in history, a poet should have thought it worth while to revive the Senecan form of tragedy is a proof of the way in which Scotland followed English fashions at a distance.

The sonnets of WILLIAM DRUMMOND of Hawthornden (1585-1649), a son of Sir John Drummond, are another proof of the same very natural circumstance. Drummond's name has suffered from his injudicious record of the visit which Ben Jonson paid him in 1618: but his sonnets, which take a very high

In

place indeed in the long catalogue of such poems, are a much more enduring claim to celebrity than his notes of Jonson's table-talk. addition to his regular sonnets, he wrote canzoni and madrigals, those customary appendages to the sonnet-cycle; nor must we forget his unique contribution to prose literature, a meditation on death called A Cypress Grove (1623), which has hardly attracted the notice it deserves. Although Drummond had lived much in France, and must certainly have been acquainted with French and Italian sonnet work, his own originality saves him from slavish imitation. The same may be said of a third sonnet writer, ROBERT KER, EARL OF ANCRUM (15781654). The work of SIR ALEXANDER SCOTT (1525?-1584?), "the Scottish Anacreon," consisting of love-songs, satires, and madrigals, belongs to a much earlier period.

The allegorical poem, of which Sir David Lyndsay had been almost the last representative, found another echo in Scotland as late as 1597, when ALEXANDER MONTGOMERIE (1556?-1610?) published The Cherry and the Slae. This work long continued to be popular, and its metre was adopted by Burns. If we add to these names SIR RICHARD MAITLAND, LORD LETHINGTON (14961586), the collector of the ancient poems which bear his name; ALEXANDER HUME (1560?-1609), whose Hymns and Sacred Songs appeared in 1599; and, last but not least, KING JAMES VI (1566-1625), our James I, who, to add to his varied stock of acquirements, and to parallel his own poetical achievements with his ancestors', produced, in 1584, a volume of verse, entitled Essayes of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesie, with the Rewlis and Cautelis to be pursued and avoided-these will complete the tale of Scottish poetry in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

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