Compared with Lyndsay's Dream and Complaint of the Papingo, the Induction of Sackville shows clearly the beneficial effects produced on English poetry by the genius of Surrey. Lyndsay's own poems are in some respects an advance on the art of his predecessors. While they are modelled on the allegorical forms peculiar to the Middle Ages, the poet is not content, like Dunbar in The Golden Targe, and Douglas in The Palace of Honour, with the treatment of a mere scholastic theme; his moral is intended to suggest a remedy for actual evils; the cast of his thought, practical, and satirical, is occupied with the fortunes of "John Commonweal," or the State. But he has no conception of conveying his instruction in a poetical form. The old conventional machinery, of allegory is good enough for his purpose. He is satisfied with showing the reader the bare fact that bad popes, emperors, and kings are in Hell; when his Itinerarium Mentis has brought him within view of the realm of Scotland, he thinks only of classifying the evils he sees there; he is quite careless whether the speeches he puts into the mouth of his dying Papingo are appropriate to a bird, so long as he can deliver a shrewd stroke of satire at the abuses which move his indignation. Something of the same kind of rudeness is visible in Baldwin's and Ferrers' scheme for presenting the different tragedies in The Mirror for Magistrates. It is not so with the work of Sackville. He, too, makes use of the forms of allegory for the purposes of instruction. But with him the conception of the allegory is adapted to the ends of poetry. Everything in his action-the time, the place, the abstract character of the person-is made to conform to the ideal nature of the subject; the Induction is the work of a man who has moulded his materials according to the laws of art. Of the epic poets of England if Chaucer is the first to exhibit the genuinely classic spirit, Sackville is the first to write in the genuinely classic manner. A still more striking measure of the advance of English poetry since the improvements introduced by Surrey, is furnished by the diction and versification of Sackville in contrast with that of his predecessors. The English of Lyndsay is not a language, it is a dialect. The English of Baldwin and Ferrers, poets whose style had been formed under the old system, may be called a language in respect of vocabulary and syntax, but it is language which, never having been subjected to the rules of harmony and proportion, is rude, unbalanced, unrhythmical. In Sackville we find the art that is able to conceive alike effects of harmony as a whole, and that relation of the component parts to each other by which such effects are produced. The sustained music in the structure of the following stanza from The Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham, proceeds from a mind which is moved by a sense equally of the dignity of the subject matter, and of the metrical form in which this must necessarily clothe itself: And, Sackville, sith in purpose now thou hast And paint it forth that all estates may know : What an interval between this and the versus inopes rerum of Churchyard! CHAPTER V TRANSLATIONS OF THE CLASSICS: VIRGIL, SENECA, OVID THE accession of Elizabeth marks a distinct epoch in the history of English poetry, because it was this which first helped to blend the study of the classics and the scholarship of the Universities with the taste and imagination of the Court. The new learning had established itself without much opposition in Oxford and Cambridge. In Erasmus and his fellow-workers there was no desire to tamper with the foundations of the Catholic religion; their aim was to revive the earnestness and simplicity of faith, and at the same time to reconcile it with whatever was valuable and beautiful in the genius of Paganism. The study of Rhetoric on these lines was encouraged by the best spirits of the age, and was only opposed by ignorance and fanaticism. An attempt was made by the Scotist party at Oxford to discredit the new learning, but their stupidity was ridiculed by Sir Thomas More.1 Wolsey promoted the study of Greek by the foundation of Christ Church. Colet and Grocyn lectured on the Greek orators and poets in the same University; and Cheke and Ascham familiarised their scholars at Cambridge with the dialogues of Plato, the philosophy most highly approved by the reformers of the Continent. But the study of the classics had not yet been definitely made part of the education of the courtier. Henry VIII. favoured scholarship, but his temper was largely leavened with scholasticism; he prided himself on 1 Froude, Erasmus, p. 131. his knowledge of theology, and he loved disputation. Moreover, his taste for all the externals of chivalry made the chase and the tournament the chief amusements of his Court, In his cultivation of music he approached the ideal of Castiglione, but his passion for masques and pageants had in it the colour of mediævalism. The times of Edward VI. and of Mary were too tragic to encourage social forms of gaiety, though dramatic exhibitions were still in favour at Court. Under the former monarch the spirit of the Renaissance continued to accompany the spirit of the Reformation. Under Mary, however, a returning wave of pure mediævalism overwhelmed for the moment all that had been gained for the cause of the Reformation and learning, so that when Elizabeth came to the throne the task of reorganising society had to be undertaken from the beginning. The new sovereign united in her own nature all the conflicting principles of the time. She was born of a mother whose marriage had occasioned the separation of the English Church from the Roman Communion, but of a father who was strongly attached to all the prescriptions of the Catholic faith. She herself adhered firmly to the usages in which she had been trained, and while she saw the necessity of yielding to the current of reform in doctrinal matters, she restrained the zeal of the Puritans when it was directed against rites and ceremonies. this respect she truly represented the temper of her people at large, who had no desire to separate themselves from the life of the past. When she made her first entry into London the citizens welcomed her with a great show of those mediæval pageants which they loved: it was only in the sense of the allegory conveyed by these emblems that the spirit of change discovered itself: Time and Truth presented to the Queen a copy of the English Bible. In The same double spirit shows itself in Elizabeth's attitude towards the institution of chivalry. She was delighted with the spectacles of joustings and exhibitions of arms; she loved the reading of romances, and the action of masquerades. But she looked on knighthood with the eyes of a woman, and used her royal influence to encourage the feminine element, always inclined to predominate in romance. Hence, as her reign advanced, the worship of the female sex, initiated by the Troubadours, was converted by flattery into the worship of the Virgin Queen; while the spirit of adventurous knight errantry, reflected in the Mort d'Arthur, was blended with the softer genius of pastoralism, introduced by Sidney's Arcadia. But the strongest influence that helped to modify taste in its transition from the chivalrous Court of Henry VIII. to the romantic Court of Elizabeth, was the Queen's love of learning. The following description of her accomplishments from the pen of Roger Aschamwhatever deduction may be made from it in consideration of partiality or flattery-must be accepted as the testimony of the highest possible authority: When she Among the learned daughters of Sir Thomas More the princess Elizabeth shines like a star of distinguished lustre; deriving greater glory from her virtuous disposition and literary accomplishments than from the dignity of her exalted birth. I was her preceptor in Latin and Greek for two years. She was but little more than sixteen when she could speak French and Italian with as much fluency and propriety as her native English. She speaks Latin readily, justly, and even critically. She has often conversed with me in Greek, and with tolerable facility. transcribes Greek or Latin nothing can be more beautiful than her handwriting. She is excellently skilled in music, though not very fond of it. She has read with me all Cicero and a great part of Livy. It is chiefly from these two authors alone that she has acquired her knowledge of the Latin language. She begins the day with reading a portion of the Greek Testament, and then studies some select orations of Isocrates and the tragedies of Sophocles. . . . In every composition she is very quick in pointing out a far-fetched word or an affected phrase. She cannot endure those absurd imitators of Erasmus who mince the whole Latin language into proverbial maxims. She is much pleased with a Latin oration naturally arising from its subject, and written both chastely and perspicuously. She is most fond of translations not too free, and with that agreeable clash of VOL. II K |