In the poetry of these men, and some few others, such as Marlowe, Constable, Munday, and Barnfield in individual poems, will be found the perfection of the English pastoral lyric its simplicity and insouciance, its music and metrical felicity, its sweet pathos and tenderness, its delicate and artistic artificiality united with a genuine joy in the beauties of nature. Of the forms of this class of lyrics I shall have occasion to speak elsewhere; but I cannot refrain from here urging all true lovers of poetry not to neglect to read such exquisite lyrical artists as Greene, Lodge, and Breton- the last two, even now only too little known, and unobtainable in popular form. The pastoral mode continued in vogue to the end of Elizabeth's reign and beyond, but in the following decades it ceased to be the dominant lyrical strain.

2

But if this decade is superficially the period of the pastoral, there is in its poetry a deeper undertone not only in the artistic seriousness of Spenser, but in the sincerity and passion of Sidney. In Sidney is struck, for the first time unmistakably, that individual note, that intense and passionate cry of the poet's very heart, that was thenceforth to be the distinctive mark of the great literature of Elizabeth. Lamb and Ruskin have united to lavish upon the poetry of Sidney the most enthusiastic praise and few who know him well, will think this praise excessive. In the lyric poetry too of Sidney's friend, Fulke Greville-the period of the writing of which is doubtful, although probably contemporaneous with Sidney - there is a new and independent spirit, a widening of the sphere of the lyric theme to include non-erotic sentiment, and an all but complete

1 See the second part of this Introduction.

2 But see the scraps from the verse and prose of Greene and of Breton, recently published by Dr. Grosart, The Elizabethan Library, London, 1893 and 1894.

abandonment of the classic imagery and allusion which long continued elsewhere to be one of the chief excrescences of the ornate and elaborated style of the time. Far different

in this respect is the poetry of Watson and Barnes, who continue the Italian impulse given to English poetry by Sidney, as Greville continued his strength, if not his fervor of thought. Both the former poets exhibit, with the more strictly pastoral lyrists just mentioned, that "passionate delight in beauty" which forms the "inspiring motive" of all the renaissance poets. In the words of Professor Dowden, who is writing, apropos of Barnes, of this class of poets in general:

"They do not need ideas, or abstractions, or memories of the past or hopes for the future; it suffices them to be in presence of a bed of roses, or an arbor of eglantine, or the gold hair of a girl, or her clear eyes, bright lips, and little cloven chin, her fair shadowed throat, and budding breasts. She shall be a shepherdess, and the passionate shepherd will cull the treasures of earth, and of the heaven of the gods of Greece and Rome to lay them before her feet. It is not only the Renaissance with its rehabilitation of the senses which we find in these poems; there is in them also the Renaissance with its ingenuity, its fantasticality, its passion for conceits, and wit, and clever caprices and playing upon words. With this it is harder and perhaps not wholesome to attempt to enter into sympathy."

"1

The next decade, the last of the sixteenth century, is the time of the sonnet, long since introduced into English literature by Sir Thomas Wyatt and practiced in greater or less imitation of Italian models by his immediate successors, but not rendered a power until the masterly grasp of Astrophel and Stella, the earliest sonnet sequence in the language. Though written much earlier, this work

1 The Academy, Sept. 2, 1876.

did not appear in print until Nashe's quasi-surreptitious edition of 1591. This included not only Sidney's sequence, but "sundry other rare sonnets of divers noblemen and gentlemen," notably twenty-seven sonnets of Samuel Daniel, who was then traveling abroad. Daniel resented this premature publication of his work, and in the following year put forth a true edition of his Delia, which included the sonnets published by Nashe, and others. Constable's Diana appeared in the same year and enjoyed a remarkable popularity. With this, sonneteering became the fashion, and sequence after sequence, in repeated editions, issued from the press. After Sidney, Daniel, and Constable, the last of whom subsequently wrote Spiritual Sonnets to the Honor of God and His Saints, and thus first turned the sonnet to "divine uses," came in 1593 Lodge's Phyllis, Watson's Tears of Fancy, Barnes' Parthenophil and Parthenophe, mixed with other lyric forms as were many of these collections, Drayton's Idea and Dr. Giles Fletcher's Licia. In 1594, appeared Percy's Calia and the anonymous Zepheria; in 1595, Barnfield's Cynthia, Chapman's A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy, and Barnes' A Divine Century of Spiritual Sonnets; in 1596, Griffin's Fidessa, Smith's Chloris, Lynche's Diella, and, most perfect of all, Spenser's Amoretti. Sonnets of Shakespeare were well known, as Meres tells us, before 1598; Breton's The Soul's Harmony appeared in 1600, Sir John Davies' Sonnets to Philomel in Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, in 1602; Donne's Holy Sonnets and Alexander's Aurora remain of uncertain date. Other works are frequently included in this list as Watson's Passionate Century of Love, which was not written in quartorzains and falls too early to have been affected by the prevalent mode; J. C.'s Alcilia and Greville's Calica, neither of which preserves the sonnet form although both are sequences; and Breton's Arbor of Amorous Devices, which, though containing some few sonnets, is not a

sequence properly speaking. Willoughby's Avisa from its stanzaic structure, dialogue form, and satiric intent, not only belongs without the category of sonnets, but is not lyrical.

It will be noticed that these sonnet sequences fall naturally into certain well defined groups. The vast majority are devoted to the celebration of the passion of love: some, as Sidney's, Drayton's, Spenser's, and Shakespeare's, suggesting by means of successive lyrical moods a more or less connected love story, of greater or less probable basis in fact; another class dealing with the praises of a mistress or lamenting her hardness of heart as Phyllis, Cynthia, and Diana or Watson's Tears of Fancy. Yet another class are little more than loosely connected series of amatory verse, as Breton's Arbor or J. C.'s Alcilia; or even collections of poems amatory and other, as Greville's Calica, having nothing in common with the sonnet except a certain unity of thought and brevity of form. On the much discussed question of the subjective significance of these sequences, I do not feel called upon to write here. Suffice it to say that in these cases it is as easy to interpret mere lyrical hyperbole into a chronique scandaleuse as it is tempting to etherialize real human passion into what Mr. Walter Bagehot called in a different connection "evanescent mists of lyrical energy." The convenient length of the sonnet early suggested its use as occasional verse (cf. Raleigh's sonnet prefixed to The Faery Queen, or Barnfield's In Praise of Music and Poetry, p. 87), a use which continued throughout the period. Lastly, we find Constable, Barnes, Breton, and Donne turning the form to the expression of religious emotion in sequences of "Divine Sonnets." (For examples, see Barnes' Talent, and Donne's sonnet To Death, pp. 81 and 142.) Chapman's A Coronet for his Mistress Philosophy is probably the earliest attempt to write a sonnet sequence neither devotional nor amatory. Although

the sonnet continued a popular form during the remainder of the reign of Elizabeth and that of her successor, excepting the work of William Drummond, a scholarly poet, who lived much in the past, and series like William Browne's Calia and Visions, the writing of sonnet sequences went out of the literary fashion with the close of the former reign. The old sequences, however, continued in popularity, as the frequency of later editions attest, up to the time of Withers' Phil'arete and Habington's Castara, erotic sequences eschewing the sonnet form altogether.

Notwithstanding the surprising excellence of even the minor sonneteers of the time, the Elizabethan sonnet is a peculiarly restricted product, with its fixed form and a theme for the most part limited and conventionalized to a definite method of treating a single passion. Shakespeare recognized this, and, although himself not above practicing all these subtle arts and wiles, and outdoing the sugared similes and rapturous hyperboles of the sonnet tribe, did not hesitate to ridicule the school and its follies in the honest, direct sonnet, beginning :

and ending

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun,
Coral is far more red than her lips red;

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.1
1

Less known, though scarcely less excellent of its kind, is Chapman's rebuke, the first of his sonnets to "his Mistress Philosophy," which I quote here as representing the attitude of the more serious minds of the age towards the excessive ornament and eroticism of the time:

1 See p. 87.