the midst of a complete triumph of principles diametrically opposed to the romantic ideals which had begot this freedom and excess, it was to be expected that the critics of the next century should do injustice to the past. Severe and condemnatory, flippantly patronizing or weakly apologetic—such is the attitude of these and even of later critics as to Donne and his imitators. Rarely has criticism passed beyond the lines so carefully and so perversely drawn by Dr. Samuel Johnson in his famous passage on the "metaphysical poets " in his life of Cowley. As this subject is of prime importance in any discussion of the poetry of the seventeenth century, no apology need be offered for quoting once more the familiar words of Dr. Johnson.

"The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor: but, unluckily resolving to show it in rhyme, instead of writing poetry they only wrote verses, and very often such verses as stood the trial of the finger better than of the ear; for the modulation was so imperfect that they were only found to be verses by counting the syllables.

"If the father of criticism has rightly denominated poetry Téxνη μμηTikỲ, an imitative art, these writers will, without great wrong, lose their right to the name of poets; for they cannot be said to have imitated anything: they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter nor represented the operations of the intellect.

"Those however who deny them to be poets, allow them to be wits. Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries, that they fall below Donne in wit; but maintains, that they surpass him in poetry."1

This famous deliverance is a glaring instance of that species of criticism which is worked up out of the critical dicta of others, a mystery not wholly confined to Dr. Johnson 1 Lives of the English Poets, Cowley, ed. Tauchnitz, I, II.

nor to his age. If now we turn to Dryden's Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, we shall find the following passage addressed to the Earl of Dorset and concerned mainly with a eulogy of the poetry of that noble author.

"There is more salt in all your verses, than I have seen in any of the moderns, or even of the ancients; but you have been sparing of the gall, by which means you have pleased all readers, and offended none. Donne alone, 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. . . You equal Donne in the variety, thoughts; you excel him in the

multiplicity, and choice of

manner and the words. I read you both with the same

same delight. He affects the satires, but in his amourous

admiration, but not with the metaphysics, not only in his verses; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softness of love. In this (if I may be pardoned for so bold a truth) Mr. Cowley has copied him to a fault." 2

Several things are to be remarked on this passage: (1) that Donne is only mentioned incidentally, the main purpose being the encomium upon the satire of the noble and now forgotten lord; (2) that the discussion is confined to satire, although a side reference is made to Donne's amorous verse, and Cowley is charged with imitating these products of Donne; (3) that Donne is praised for "variety, multiplicity, and choiceness of thought"; (4) that he is said to be "wanting in dignity of expression" and "in manner and

1 This essay was originally prefixed to the translation of Juvenal (ed. Scott-Saintsbury, XII, 1–123). See also Professor Hales' introductory note to Donne in Ward's English Poets, I, 558. 2 Ibid., p. 6.

words"; (5) that he needs translation “into numbers and English "; and (6) that he affects the metaphysics in his amorous verse, where nature only should reign. Here it was then that Dr. Johnson obtained the suggestion of linking the names of Donne and Cowley and the specific dictum which he extended to all their work; here it was that he found the word "metaphysical," which he liberally enlarged by inference to include most of the poets of the reigns of James I and his son who differed in manner from Dryden and Waller. From the same passage Pope and Parnell derived the idea of translating "into numbers and English" the satires of Donne; and the only thing which the critics of the next age omitted was the "variety, multiplicity, and choice of thoughts," which even the master of the rival school, who had read though he had not studied Donne, could not deny him. This is not the place in which to follow subsequent criticism of "the metaphysical poets." It is based almost wholly on Dr. Johnson's dictum, and involves the same sweeping generalizations of undoubtedly salient defects into typical qualities and the same want of a reference of these defects to their real sources.1

Other terms have been used to express the obliquity of thought if I may so employ the word which is peculiar to Donne and his school. Such is the adjective 'fantastic,' from the excessive play of images of the fancy which these poets permit themselves. This is less happy than Dryden's 'metaphysical,' to which a real value attaches in that it singles out the unquestioned fondness of these writers for 'conceits' drawn from the sciences and from speculative

1 In another place (the Dedication to Eleonora, ed. Scott-Saintsbury, XI, 123) Dryden designated Donne "the greatest wit, though not the best poet of our nation." Here again Johnson found a cue for his famous discussion of wit, which follows the last paragraph of the passage quoted above.

philosophy. De Quincey proposed the word 'rhetorical,' with a characteristic refinement restricting its meaning to the sense in which "rhetoric lays the principal stress on the management of thoughts and only a secondary one upon the ornaments of style." This has the merit of recognizing) the dialectical address and the constructive design and ingenuity which were Donne's and Carew's, though by no means equally Cowley's. When all has been said, we must recognize that none of these terms fully explains the complex conditions of the lyric of this age.

Special characteristics aside, there is no more distinctive mark of the poetry of this age than the all but universal practice of conceit.' By Jonson and Bacon this word was employed for the thing conceived, the thought, the image. It was likewise employed, however, in the signification, more current later, of a thought far-fetched and ingenious rather than natural and obvious. That the 'conceit' in this latter sense was no stranger to the verse and prose of the reign of Elizabeth is attested by innumerable examples from the days of Sidney to those of Donne.2

Thus Gascoigne, with a more vivid consciousness of the persistence of hackneyed poetical figure than is usual amongst minor poets, declares: "If I should undertake to wryte in prayse of a gentlewoman, I would neither praise hir christal eye, nor hir cherrie lippe, etc. For these things are trita et obvia. But I would either find some supernaturall cause whereby my penne might walke in the superlative

1 Historical Essays, American ed. 1856, II, 228, 229.

2 Murray (Dictionary, s.v.) quotes Puttenham (ed. Arber, p. 20) for an early use of this word: "Others of a more fine and pleasaunt head ... in short poemes uttered prettie merry conceits, and these men were called Epigrammatists." Sidney (according to Dr. C. G. Child) is the earliest English poet to exhibit the conceit as a distinctive feature of style.

degree, or else ・ ・ ・ I would

make a strange discourse of some intollerable passion, or finde occasion to pleade by the example of some historie, or discover my disquiet in shadows per Allegoriam, or use the covertest meane that I could to avoyde the uncomely customes of common writers.'

1

That this species of wit became more and more popular as the reign of James advanced is explained by the general decline from imagination to fancy which marks the trend of the whole age, and which came in time to ascribe a false dignity and importance to keenness and readiness in the discovery of accidental and even trivial similarities in things unlike. The gradations of the word 'wit' range from ingenium, insight, mental power, to the snap of the toy cracker denominated a pun. Wit may consist in the thought and the wisdom thereof or in the merest accident of sound or form. The genuine Caroline 'conceit' is mostly in the fibre of the thought, and, unlike the antithetical wit of the next age, is, as a rule, unaided by structural or rhetorical device. Thus Cowley says of those who carved the wooden images for the temple of Jerusalem:

[They] carve the trunks and breathing shapes bestow,
Giving the trees more life than when they grow 2;

and Clieveland asks, apropos of the possibility of a bee's stinging his mistress:

What wasp would prove

Ravaillac to my queen of love? 3

1 With the foreign sources of the Elizabethan and Jacobean conceit we cannot be here concerned. See on this subject the forthcoming monograph of Dr. Clarence G. Child on The Seventeenth Century Conceit, shortly to appear in the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America.

2 The Davideis, ii. 528, 529.

3 Clievelandi Vindiciae, ed. 1677, p. 4.