world yet not of the world, recognizing and loyal to a scale of values that is not the world's:

Earth cannot show so brave a sight
As when a single soul does fence
The batteries of alluring sense,

And heaven views it with delight.

4

In no poetry more than the religious did the English genius in the seventeenth century declare its strong individuality, its power of reacting on the traditions and fashions which, in the Elizabethan age, had flowed in upon it from the Latin countries of Europe. There are individual poets who have risen to greater heights of religious and mystical feeling-some of the mediaeval hymn-writers, Dante, perhaps John of the Cross-but no country or century has produced a more individual or varied devout poetry, resting on the fundamental religious experience of alienation from and reconciliation to God, complicated by ecclesiastical and individual varieties of temperament and interpretation, than the country and century of Giles Fletcher and John Donne, Herbert and Vaughan, and Traherne and Crashaw, of John Milton, to say nothing of great poet-preachers like Donne and Taylor, or the allegory of Bunyan and the musings of Sir Thomas Brown.

IV

When Dryden and his generation passed judgement, not merely on the conceits, but on the form of the earlier poetry, what they had in view was especially their use of the decasyllabic couplet in eulogistic, elegiac, and satiric and narrative verses. 'All of them were thus far of Eugenius his opinion that the sweetness of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers ... and every one was willing to acknowledge how much our poesy is improved by the happiness of some writers yet living, who

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first taught us to mould our thoughts into easy and significant
words, to retrench the superfluities of expression, and to make
our rhyme so properly a part of the verse, that it should never
mislead the sense, but itself be led and governed by it.' 'Donne
alone', Dryden tells the Earl of Dorset, of all our countrymen
had your talent: but was not happy enough to arrive at your
versification; and were he translated into numbers and English,
he would yet be wanting in the dignity of expression.' Sweetness
and strength of versification, dignity of expression-these were
the qualities which Dryden and his generation believed they
had conferred upon English poetry.
There was before the
time of Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words at once
refined from the grossness of domestic use, and free from
the harshness of terms appropriated to particular arts.
Those happy combinations of words which distinguish poetry
from prose had been rarely attempted; we had few elegances
or flowers of speech, the roses had not yet been plucked from
the brambles, or different colours had not been joined to enliven
one another.' Johnson is amplifying and emphasizing Dryden's
'dignity of expression', and it is well to remember that Scott
at the beginning of the next century is still of the same opinion.
It is also worth remembering, in order to see a critical period
of our poetical history in a true perspective, that Milton fully
shared Dryden's opinion of the poetry of his time, though he
had a different conception of how poetic diction and verse should
be reformed. He, too, one may gather from his practice and
from occasional references, disapproved the want of selection in
the 'metaphysicals'' diction, and created for himself a poetic
idiom far removed from current speech. His fine and highly
trained ear disliked the frequent harshness of their versification,
their indifference to the well-ordered melody of vowel and

consonant, the grating, 'scrannel pipe' concatenations which he notes so scornfully in the verse of Bishop Hall:

'Teach each hollow grove to sound his love

Wearying echo with one changeless word.

And so he well might, and all his auditory besides, with his "teach each "' (An Apology for Smectymnuus). But the flowers which Milton cultivated are not those of Dryden, nor was his ear satisfied with the ring of the couplet. He must have disliked as much as Dryden the breathless, headlong overflow of Pharonnida (if he ever read it), the harsh and abrupt crossing of the rhythmical by the rhetorical pattern of Donne's Satires, but he knew that the secret of harmonious verse lay in this subtle crossing and blending of the patterns, 'apt numbers, fit quantity of syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one verse into another'. Spenser was Milton's poetic father, and his poetic diction and elaborately varied harmony are a development of Spenser's art by one who has absorbed more completely the spirit, understood more perfectly the art, of Virgil and the Greeks, who has taken Virgil and Homer for his teachers rather than Ariosto and Tasso. Dryden's reform was due to no such adherence to an older and more purely poetic tradition though he knew and admired the ancients. His development was on the line of Donne and the metaphysicals, their assimilation of poetic idiom and rhythm to that of the spoken language, but the talk of which Dryden's poetry is an idealization is more choice and select, less natural and fanciful, and rises more frequently to the level of oratory. Like other reforms, Dryden's was in great measure a change of fashion. Men's minds and ears were dis

posed to welcome a new tone and tune, a new accent, neither

that of high song,

passionate thoughts

To their own music chanted,

nor of easy, careless, but often delightful talk and song blended, which is the tone of the metaphysical lyric, but the accent of the orator, the political orator of a constitutional country.

It was in satire, the Satires of Hall, Marston, and Donne' especially the last-that the 'unscrewing' of the decasyllabic couplet began, in part as a deliberate effort to reproduce the colloquial ease of Horace's, the harshness of Persius's satiric style and verse. The fashion quickly spread to narrative, eulogistic, elegiac, and reflective poetry, and like other fashions-vers libre for example was welcomed by many who found in it an easier gradus ad Parnassum, a useful discovery when every one had at times to pen a compliment to friend or patron.

which

After Spenser Elizabethan narrative poetry suffered almost without exception from the uncontented care to write better than one could', the sacrifice of story and character to the elaboration of sentimental and descriptive rhetoric. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece are no exception to this failure to secure that perfect balance of narrative, dramatic and poetic interest, makes Chaucer's tales unsurpassed models in their kind. The 'metaphysical' fashion changed merely the character of the rhetoric, shifting the weight from diction and verse to wit, to diavola. One can study the result in Davenant's Gondibert and Cowley's Davideis, where the dramatic thread of story is almost lost to sight in the embroidery of comment and 'witty' simile:

Oswald in wars was worthily renowned;

Though gay in Courts, coarsely in Camps could live;
Judg'd danger soon, and first was in it found;
Could toil to gain what he with ease did give.
Yet toils and dangers through ambition lov'd;
Which does in war the name of Virtue own;
But quits that name when from the war remov❜d,

As Rivers theirs when from their Channels gone.

The most readable-if with somewhat of a wrestle-is Chamberlayne's Pharonnida. The story is compounded of the tedious elements of Greek romance—shepherds and courts and loves and rapes and wars-and no one can take the smallest interest in the characters. The verse is breathless and the style obscure, as that of Mr. Doughty is, because the writer uses the English language as if he had found it lying about and was free of it without regard to any tradition of idiom or structure. Still Chamberlayne does realize the scenes which he describes and decorates with all the arabesques of a fantastic and bewildering yet poetic wit:

The Spring did, when

The princess first did with her pleasure grace
This house of pleasure, with soft arms embrace
The Earth-his lovely mistress-clad in all
The painted robes the morning's dew let fall
Upon her virgin bosom; the soft breath
Of Zephyrus sung calm anthems at the death
Of palsy-shaken Winter, whose large grave,
The earth, whilst they in fruitful tears did lave,
Their pious grief turned into smiles, they throw
Over the hearse a veil of flowers; the low

And pregnant valleys swelled with fruit, whilst Heaven
Sed on each blessing its fair hand had given.

But the peculiar territory of the metaphysical poets, outside love-song and devout verse, was eulogy and elegy. They were pedants but also courtiers abounding in compliments to royal and noble patrons and friends and fellow poets. Here again Donne is the great exemplar of erudite and transcendental, subtle and seraphic compliments to noble and benevolent countesses. One may doubt whether the thing ought to be done at all, but there can be no doubt that Donne does it well, and no one was better aware of the fact than Dryden, whose eulogies, whether

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