No, marry shall he, Sir, quoth I. George. Thou clown, did'st thou set his horse upon thy cloak? Jenk. Aye, but mark how I served him. Madge and he was no sooner gone down into the ditch But I plucked out my knife, cut four holes in my cloak, and made his horse stand on the bare ground." The first part of Jeronymo is an indifferent piece of work, and the second, or the Spanish Tragedy by Kyd, is like unto it, except the interpolations idly said to have been added by Ben Jonson, relating to Jeronymo's phrensy" which have all the melancholy madness of poetry, if not the inspiration." LECTURE VI. ON MISCELLANEOUS POEMS, F. BEAUMONT, P. FLETCHER, DRAYTON, DANIEL, &c. SIR P.SIDNEY'S ARCADIA, AND OTHER WORKS. I SHALL, in the present Lecture, attempt to give some idea of the lighter productions of the Muse in the period before us, in order to shew that grace and elegance are not confined entirely to later times, and shall conclude with some remarks on Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. I have already made mention of the lyrical pieces of Beaumont and Fletcher. It appears from his poems, that many of these were composed by Francis Beaumont, particularly the very beautiful ones in the tragedy of the False One, the Praise of Love in that of Valentinian, and another in the Nice Valour or Passionate Madman, an Address to Melancholy, which is the perfection of this kind of writing. "Hence, all you vain delights; As short as are the nights Wherein you spend your folly: There's nought in this life sweet, Oh, sweetest melancholy. Welcome folded arms and fixed eyes, Then stretch our bones in a still, gloomy valley; It has been supposed (and not without every appearance of good reason) that this pensive strain, "most musical, most melancholy," gave the first suggestion of the spirited introduction to Milton's Il Penseroso. "Hence, vain deluding joys, The brood of folly without father bred! Hail, divinest melancholy, Whose saintly visage is too bright To hit the sense of human sight, &c." The same writer thus moralises on the life of man, in a set of similes, as apposite as they are light and elegant. "Like to the falling of a star, Or as the flights of eagles are, "The silver foam which the wind severs from the parted wave" is not more light or sparkling than this: the dove's downy pinion is not softer and smoother than the verse. We are too ready to conceive of the poetry of that day, as altogether old-fashioned, meagre, squalid, deformed, withered and wild in its attire, or as a sort of uncouth monster, like "grim-visaged comfortless despair," mounted on a lumbering, unmanageable Pegasus, dragon-winged, and leadenhoofed; but it as often wore a sylph-like form with Attic vest, with faery feet, and the butterfly's gaudy wings. The bees were said to have come, and built their hive in the mouth of Plato when a child; and the fable might be transferred to the sweeter accents of Beaumont and Fletcher! Beaumont died at the age of five and twenty. One of these writers makes Bellario the Page say to Philaster, who threatens to take his life ""Tis not a life; 'Tis but a piece of childhood thrown away." But here was youth, genius, aspiring hope, growing reputation, cut off like a flower in its summer-pride, or like "the lily on its stalk green," which makes us repine at fortune and almost at nature, that seem to set so little store by their greatest favourites. The life of poets is or ought to be (judging of it from the light it lends to ours) a golden dream, full of brightness and sweetness, lapt in Elysium;" and it gives one a reluctant pang to see the splendid vision, by which they are attended in their path of glory, fade like a vapour, and their sacred heads laid low in ashes, before the sand of common mortals has run out. Fletcher too was prematurely cut off by the plague. Raphael died at four and thirty, and Correggio at forty. Who can help wishing that they had lived to the age of Michael Angelo and Titian? Shakespear might have lived another half century, enjoying fame and now that his task was smoothly done," listening to the music of his name, and repose, |