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JOSEPH HALL.

[JOSEPH HALL, Successively Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, was born July 1st, 1574, at Bristow Park, near Ashby de la Zouch, in Leicestershire. His prose writings, which are very voluminous, have gained him the title of the Christian Seneca. His polemical works brought him into collision with Milton; his sermons rank among the most eloquent in our language; his characters of Virtues and Vices were the delight of Lamb; and his Occasional Meditations still maintain their popularity. He terminated a life of much usefulness and many troubles at Higham, near Norwich, September 8th, 1656, in the eighty-second year of his age. As a poet Hall is known only by his Satires, which were written when he was a very young man. They came out in two instalments, the first of which was entitled Virgidemiarum, First three Bookes of Toothlesse Satyrs-Poetical, Academical, Moral, and appeared in 1597; the second, entitled Virgidemiarum, The three Last Bookes of Byting Satyrs, were published in the following year. Both parts were reprinted in 1599, and again in 1602.]

Hall boasts that he was the first English satirist. This is not true. To say nothing of the fathers of our tongue, and of the satires of Barklay, Skelton, Roye, and Gascoigne, he had been anticipated in his own walk by Thomas Lodge, whose Fig for Momus appeared in 1593. Hall has however a higher claim to praise. He was the founder of a great dynasty of satirists. He made satire popular, and he determined its form. Marston immediately succeeded him as his disciple; the author of Skialetheia, the author of Microcynicon, and innumerable other anonymous satirists followed in rapid succession, till we reach Donne and Jonson, Wither and Marvel, Dryden and Oldham. In all these poets the influence of Hall is either directly or indirectly perceptible. Dryden had in all probability perused him with care, and Pope was so sensible of his merits that he not only carefully interlined his copy of Hall, but expressed much regret that he had not been acquainted with his Satires sooner.

Hall's abilities, not only as a satirist, but as a descriptive writer and as a master of style, are of a high order. His models were, he

tells us, Horace, Juvenal, and Persius. With the first he has little in common; he has none of his sobriety, none of his grace, none of his urbanity. To the influence of the third is to be attributed his most characteristic defect, obscurity, an obscurity which arises not from confusion or plethora of thought, but from affectation in expression, from archaic phraseology, from unfamiliar combinations, from recondite allusions, from elliptical apostrophes, and from abrupt transitions. To Juvenal his obligations were great indeed. He borrows his phrases, his turns, his rhetorical exaggerations, his trick of allusive and incidental satire, his reflections, his whole method of dealing with and delineating vice. But borrowing he assimilates. Hall's satire is distinguished by its vehemence and intrepidity. He has himself described the savage delight with which he applied himself to satirical composition, and every fervid page testifies the truth of his confession. He never seems to flag his energy and fertility of invective are inexhaustible. He has in his six books bared and lashed every vice in the long and dreary catalogue of human frailty; but the reader, soon surfeited, is glad to leave him to pursue his ungrateful task alone. Nor is Hall more attractive when painting the minor foibles of mankind; for his humour is hard, his touch heavy, and his wit saturnine. As a delineator of men and manners he will always be interesting. His Satires are a complete picture of English society at the end of the sixteenth century. His sketches are vivid and singularly realistic, for he has the rare art of being minute without being prolix, of crowding without confusing his canvas; and he united the faculty of keen observation to great natural insight. History is indeed almost as much beholden to him as satire.

His style is, for the age at which his poems appeared, wonderful. Though marred by the defects to which we have referred, it is as a rule at once energetic and elegant, at once fluent and felicitous, at once terse and ornate. He carried the heroic couplet almost to perfection. His versification is indeed sometimes so voluble and vigorous, that we might, as Campbell well observed, imagine ourselves reading Dryden. To cull one or two examples :—

Fond fool! six feet shall serve for all thy store,
And he that cares for most shall find no more.'

'Nay, let the Devil and St. Valentine

Be gossips to those ribald rhymes of thine,
And each day dying lives, and living dies.'

He is the first of our authors to evince decided powers of epigrammatic expression, and to diversify the heroic couplet by the introduction of the triplet. It is much to be regretted that Hall's most vigorous and most successful writing is of such a character as makes it impossible to be presented to general readers in our day. The conclusion of the first satire of the fourth book, and of the fourth satire of the same book, are passages in question. In consulting the interests of propriety we are, we must add, not consulting the interests of Hall's fame as a satirist, though the shade of a Father of the Church will we trust forgive the injury.

Besides these Satires he was the author of a few miscellaneous poems, chiefly of a religious and elegiac character, but they are not of much value.

J. CHURTON COLLINS.

THE GOLDEN AGE

[From Book iii. Satire 1.]

Time was, and that was termed the time of gold,
When world and time were young that now are old
(When quiet Saturn swayed the mace of lead,
And pride was yet unborn, and yet unbred).
Time was, that whiles the autumn fall did last,
Our hungry sires gap'd for the falling mast
Of the Dodonian oaks.

Could no unhusked acorn leave the tree

But there was challenge made whose it might be.
And if some nice and licorous appetite
Desir'd more dainty dish of rare delight,
They scal'd the stored crab with clasped knee
Till they had sated their delicious eye:
Or search'd the hopeful thicks of hedgy rows
For briery berries, or haws, or sourer sloes.
Or when they meant to fare the fin'st of all,
They lick'd oak-leaves bespread with honey-fall.
As for the thrice three-angled beech-nut shell,
Or chestnut's armed husk and hid kernell,
No squire durst touch, the law would not afford.
Kept for the court, and for the king's own board,
Their royal plate was clay, or wood, or stone:
The vulgar, save his hand, else he had none.
Their only cellar was the neighbour brook:
None did for better care, for better look;
Was then no plaining of the brewer's scape,
Nor greedy vintner mix'd the strained grape.
The king's pavilion was the grassy green
Under safe shelter of the shady treen.
Under each bank men laid their limbs along,
Not wishing any ease, not fearing wrong,
Clad with their own as they were made of old,
Not feeling shame nor feeling any cold.

HOLLOW HOSPITALITY.

[From Book iii. Sat. 3.]

The courteous citizen bade me to his feast
With hollow words, and overly' request:
'Come, will ye dine with me this holiday?'
I yielded, though he hop'd I would say nay:
For I had maiden'd it, as many use;
Loath for to grant, but loather to refuse.

'Alack, sir, I were loath-another day,—

I should but trouble you ;-pardon me, if you may.'
No pardon should I need; for, to depart

He gives me leave, and thanks too, in his heart.
Two words for money, Darbyshirian wise:
(That's one too many) is a naughty guise.
Who looks for double biddings to a feast,
May dine at home for an importune guest.
I went, then saw, and found the great expense;
The face and fashions of our citizens.

Oh, Cleopatrical! what wanteth there

For curious cost, and wondrous choice of cheer?
Beef, that erst Hercules held for finest fare;
Pork, for the fat Boeotian, or the hare
For Martial; fish for the Venetian;
Goose-liver for the licorous Roman;

Th' Athenian's goat; quail, Iolaus' cheer;

The hen for Esculape, and the Parthian deer;
Grapes for Arcesilas, figs for Pluto's mouth,

And chestnuts fair for Amarillis' tooth.

Hadst thou such cheer? wert thou ever there before?
Never, I thought so: nor come there no more.
Come there no more; for so meant all that cost:
Never hence take me for thy second host.
For whom he means to make an often guest,

One dish shall serve; and welcome make the rest.

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2 Plutarch, Moralia 668 a, calls Arcesilaus piλóßorpus.

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