The consideration of this made Mr Hales of Eton say that there was no subject of which any poet ever writ, but he would produce it much better done in Shakespeare ; and however others are now generally preferred before him, yet the age wherein he lived, which had contemporaries with him Fletcher and Jonson, never equalled them to him in their esteem. And in the last king's court, when Ben's reputation was at highest, Sir John Suckling, and with him the greater part of the courtiers, set our Shakespeare far above him.

Beaumont and Fletcher.

Beaumont and Fletcher, of whom I am next to speak, had, with the advantage of Shakespeare's wit, which was their precedent, great natural gifts, improved by study; Beaumont especially being so accurate a judge of plays that Ben Jonson, while he lived, submitted all his writings to his censure, and, 'tis thought, used his judgment in correcting if not contriving all his plots. What value he had for him appears by the verses he writ to him, and therefore I need speak no farther of it. The first play that brought Fletcher and him in esteem was their Philaster; for before that they had written two or three very unsuccessfully: as the like is reported of Ben Jonson before he writ Every Man in his Humour. Their plots were generally more regular than Shakespeare's, especially those which were made before Beaumont's death; and they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen much better; whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in repartees no poet before them could paint as they have done. Humour, which Ben Jonson derived from particular persons, they made it not their business to describe; they represented all the passions very lively, but above all, love. I am apt to believe the English language in them arrived to its highest perfection: what words have since been taken in are rather superfluous than ornamental. Their plays are now the most pleasant and frequent entertainments of the stage; two of theirs being acted through the year for one of Shakespeare's or Jonson's: the reason is because there is a certain gaiety in their comedies and pathos in their more serious plays, which suits generally with all men's humours. Shakespeare's language is likewise a little obsolete, and Ben Jonson's wit comes short of theirs.

Ben Jonson.

As for Jonson, to whose character I am now arrived, if we look upon him while he was himself (for his last plays were but his dotages) I think him the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had. He was a most severe judge of himself, as well as others. One cannot say he wanted wit, but rather that he was frugal of it. In his works you find little to retrench or alter. Wit, and language, and humour also in some measure we had before him; but something of art was wanting to the drama till he came. He managed his strength to more advantage than any who preceded him. You seldom find him making love in any of his scenes, or endeavouring to move the passions; his genius was too sullen and saturnine to do it gracefully, especially when he knew he came after those who had performed both to such a height. Humour was his proper sphere; and in that he delighted most to represent mechanic people. He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them; there is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those

times whom he has not translated in Sejanus and Catiline. But he has done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets is only victory in him. With the spoils of these writers he so represents old Rome to us in its rites, ceremonies, and customs, that if one of their poets had written either of his tragedies, we had seen less of it than in him. If there was any fault in his language 'twas that he weaved it too closely and laboriously, in his comedies especially : perhaps too he did a little too much Romanise our tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them; wherein though he learnedly followed their language, he did not enough comply with the idiom of ours. If I would compare him with Shakespeare, I must acknowledge him the more correct poet, but Shakespeare the greater wit. Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets: Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing; I admire him, but I love Shakespeare. To conclude of him as he has given us the most correct plays, so in the precepts which he has laid down in his Discoveries, we have as many and profitable rules for perfecting the stage as any wherewith the French can furnish us.

Dramatic Dialogue after the Restoration.

I have always acknowledged the wit of our prede cessors with all the veneration which becomes me; but I am sure their wit was not that of gentlemen; there was ever somewhat that was ill-bred and clownish in it, and which confessed the conversation of the authors.

And this leads me to the last and greatest advantage of our writing, which proceeds from conversation. In the age wherein those poets lived there was less of gallantry than in ours; neither did they keep the best company of theirs. Their fortune has been much like that of Epicurus in the retirement of his gardens; to live almost unknown, and to be celebrated after their decease. I cannot find that any of them had been conversant in courts except Ben Jonson; and his genius lay not so much that way as to make an improvement by it. Greatness was not then so easy of access, nor conversation so free, as it now is. I cannot, therefore, conceive it any insolence to affirm, that by the knowledge and pattern of their wit who writ before us, and by the advantage of our own conversation, the discourse and raillery of our comedies excel what has been written by them. And this will be denied by none but some few old fellows who value themselves on their acquaintance with the Black Friars; who, because they saw their plays, would pretend a right to judge ours.

Now, if any ask me whence it is that our conversation is so much refined, I must freely and without flattery ascribe it to the court, and in it particularly to the king, whose example gives a law to it. His own misfortunes and the nation's afforded him an opportunity which is rarely allowed to sovereign princes, I mean of travelling and being conversant in the most polished courts of Europe; and thereby of cultivating a spirit which was formed by nature to receive the impressions of a gallant and generous education. At his return, he found a nation lost as much in barbarism as in rebellion and as the excellency of his nature forgave the one, so the excellency of his manners reformed the other. The desire of imitat ing so great a pattern first awakened the dull and heavy spirits of the English from their natural reservedness,

loosened them from their stiff forms of conversation, and made them easy and pliant to each other in discourse. Thus insensibly our way of living became more free; and the fire of the English wit, which was before stifled under a constrained melancholy way of breeding, began first to display its force by mixing the solidity of our nation with the air and gaiety of our neighbours. This being granted to be true, it would be a wonder if the poets, whose work is imitation, should be the only persons in the three kingdoms who should not receive advantage by it; or if they should not more easily imitate the wit and conversation of the present age than of the past.

(From the Defence of the Epilogue to the Second Part of The Conquest of Granada.)

On Translation.

Translation is a kind of drawing after the life; where every one will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. It is one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the colouring itself perhaps tolerable; and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole. I cannot without some indignation look on an ill copy of an excellent original; much less can I behold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been endeavouring all my life to imitate, so abused, as I may say, to their faces by a botching interpreter. What English readers unacquainted with Greek or Latin will believe me or any other man when we commend these authors, and confess we derive all that is pardonable in us from their fountains, if they take those to be the same poets whom our Oglebies have translated? But I dare assure them that a good poet is no more like himself in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body. There are many who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother-tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few; it is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practise them without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us; the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted while he was laying in a stock of learning. Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discern not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him. And for want of all these requisites, or the greatest part of them, most of our ingenious young men take up some cried-up English poet for their model; adore him, and imitate him, as they think, without knowing wherein he is defective, where he is boyish and trifling, wherein either his thoughts are improper to his subject, or his expressions unworthy of his thoughts, or the turn of both is unharmonious.

Thus it appears necessary that a man should be a nice critic in his mother-tongue before he attempts to translate in a foreign language. Neither is it sufficient that he be able to judge of words and style, but he must be a master of them too: he must perfectly understand his author's tongue, and absolutely command his own; so that to be a thorough translator he must be a

thorough poet. Neither is it enough to give his author's sense in good English, in poetical expressions, and in musical numbers; for though all these are exceeding difficult to perform, yet there remains a harder task; and it is a secret of which few translators have sufficiently thought. I have already hinted a word or two concerning it; that is the maintaining the character of an author which distinguishes him from all others, and makes him appear that individual poet whom you would interpret. For example, not only the thoughts but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid are very different; yet I see even in our best poets who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents; and by endeavouring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them both so much alike that if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies which was Virgil and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late noble painter that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happened to him because he always studied himself more than those who sat to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which performed the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another. Suppose two authors are equally sweet; yet there is as great distinction to be made in sweetness as in that of sugar and that of honey. I can make the difference more plain, by giving you (if it be worth knowing) my own method of proceeding, in my translations out of four several poets in this volume: Virgil, Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace. In each of these, before I undertook them, I considered the genius and distinguishing character of my author. I looked on Virgil as a succinct and grave majestic writer; one who weighed not only every thought, but every word and syllable; who was still aiming to crowd his sense into as narrow a compass as possibly he could; for which reason he is so very figurative, that he requires, I may almost say, a grammar apart to construe him. His verse is everywhere sounding the very thing in your ears whose sense it bears; yet the numbers are perpetually varied, to increase the delight of the reader, so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, though they write in styles differing from each other, yet have each of them but one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines, and then he begins again in the same tenor, perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives and two adjectives, with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and sound as he; he is always, as it were, upon the hand-gallop, and his verse runs upon carpet ground. He avoids like the other all synalephas, or cutting off one vowel when it comes before another in the following word; so that, minding only smoothness, he wants both variety and majesty. But to return to Virgil: though he is smooth where smoothness is required, yet he is so far from affecting it, that he seems rather to disdain it; frequently makes use of synalephas, and concludes his sense in the middle of his verse. He is everywhere above conceits of epigrammatic wit and gross hyperboles; he maintains majesty in the midst of plainness; he shines but glares not; and is stately without ambition, which is the vice of Lucan.

He who excels all other poets in his own language, were it possible to do him right, must appear above them in our tongue, which, as my Lord Roscommon justly observes, approaches nearest to the Roman in its majesty; nearest indeed, but with a vast interval betwixt them. There is an inimitable grace in Virgil's words, and in them principally consists that beauty which gives so inexpressible a pleasure to him who best understands their force. This diction of his, I must once again say, is never to be copied; and since it cannot, he will appear but lame in the best translation. The turns of his verse, his breakings, his propriety, his numbers and his gravity, I have as far imitated as the poverty of our language and the hastiness of my performance would allow. I may seem sometimes to have varied from his sense; but I think the greatest variations may be fairly deduced from him; and where I leave his commentators, it may be I understand him better; at least I writ without consulting them in many places.

(From the Preface to the Second Miscellany, 1685.)

Spenser and Milton.

[In epic poetry] the English have only to boast of Spenser and Milton, who neither of them wanted either genius or learning to have been perfect poets, and yet both of them are liable to many censures. For there is no uniformity in the design of Spenser; he aims at the accomplishment of no one action, he raises up a hero for every one of his adventures, and endows each of them with some particular moral virtue, which renders them all equal, without subordination or preference: every one is most valiant in his own legend: only we must do him that justice to observe that Magnanimity, which is the character of Prince Arthur, shines throughout the whole poem, and succours the rest when they are in distress. The original of every knight was then living in the court of Queen Elizabeth; and he attributed to each of them that virtue which he thought was most conspicuous in them: an ingenious piece of flattery, though it turned not much to his account. Had he lived to finish his poem, in the six remaining legends, it had certainly been more of a piece, but could not have been perfect, because the model was not true. But Prince Arthur, or his chief patron, Sir Philip Sidney, whom he intended to make happy by the marriage of his Gloriana, dying before him, deprived the poet both of means and spirit to accomplish his design. For the rest, his obsolete language and the ill choice of his stanza, are faults but of the second magnitude; for notwithstanding the first, he is still intelligible, at least after a little practice; and for the last, he is the more to be admired that, labouring under such a difficulty, his verses are so numerous, so various, and so harmonious, that only Virgil, whom he professedly imitated, has surpassed him among the Romans, and only Mr Waller among the English.

As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much

justice, his subject is not that of a heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and his human persons are but two. But I will not take Mr Rymer's work out of his hands: he has promised the world a critique on that author, wherein, though he will not allow. his poem for heroic, I hope he will grant us that his thoughts are elevated, his words sounding, and that no man has so happily copied the manner of Homer, or so copiously translated his Grecisms, and the Latin elegancies of Virgil. It is true he runs into a flat of thought sometimes for a hundred lines together, but it is when he has got into a track of Scripture. His antiquated words were his choice, not his necessity; for therein he imitated Spenser, as Spenser did Chaucer. And though perhaps the love of their masters may have transported both too far in the frequent use of them, yet in my opinion obsolete words may then be laudably revived, when either they are more sounding or more significant than those in practice; and when their obscurity is taken away by joining other words to them which clear the sense, according to the rule of Horace for the admission of new words. But in both cases a moderation is to be observed in the use of them; for unnecessary coinage, as well as unnecessary revival, runs into affectation: a fault to be avoided on either hand. Neither will I justify Milton for his blank verse, though I may excuse him by the example of Hannibal Caro and other Italians who have used it; for whatever causes he alleges for the abolishing of rhyme (which I have not now the leisure to examine), his own particular reason is plainly this, that rhyme was not his talent; he had neither the ease of doing it, nor the graces of it, which is manifest in his Juvenilia, or verses written in his youth, where his rhyme is always constrained and forced, and comes hardly from him, at an age when the soul is most pliant, and the passion of love makes almost every man a rhymer, though not a poet.

(From the Discourse on the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693.)

Dryden's plays appeared in two folio volumes in the year of his death, and were afterwards re-edited by his friend Congreve, in six duodecimos. The Fables, supplemented by most, though not all, of his earlier non-dramatic verse, make another folio volume of the same date. One or two somewhat imperfect editions of his poems appeared during the eighteenth century; and Malone gave an admirable collection of the prose in four volumes. But all editions were superseded by that of Sir Walter (then Mr) Scott in 1808. This was reprinted in 1821, and in 1883-93 re-edited (in 18 vols.) with additions and corrections by the writer. present Scott's Life is excellent, and is the standard; but the editions of Bell, Mitford, and Christie are useful. The new Aldine edition (by Hooper, 1892) is in 5 vols. Mr Churton Collins edited the Satires in 1893, and Professor W. P. Ker a selection of the Essays in 1900. See Dryden in the 'Men of Letters' series (1881) by the present writer, and the notices in Johnson's Lives, in Hazlitt's English Poets, in the first series of Lowell's Among my Books, and in Dr Garnett's Age of Dryden (1896). The section of the British Museum Catalogue on Dryden, separately obtainable, is a full bibliography.

GEORGE SAINTSBURY.

A

T page 505 and elsewhere it has been sufficiently insisted on that alike in volume and in quality Scottish literary production had declined to a low ebb during the troublous seventeenth century, when Scotland was truly a most distressful country, rent by factions and antipathies, tyranny and persecution, intrigue and war. Most of what came from the printing-presses, and what chiefly absorbed the interest of the nation, was not literature in the stricter sense at all, but theology, mainly polemical, and controversial politics. Yet of the small number of the second series of Scottish seventeenth-century writers it may at least be said that they are wonderfully representative of the most opposite tempers and parties: the royalist Montrose who made so much of the Highlanders, the Cameronian colonel who jeered at them in verse and foiled them in the field; Rabelaisian Urquhart and ultra-Puritan Gillespie; the sainted Archbishop Leighton and the irreconcilable Presbyterian mystic Rutherford face to face with the Sempills, delineators of rude and vulgar merriment; the persecutor of the heroes of the Covenant and their panegyrist; and Fletcher, a whole party in himself. Some wrote in English almost as Englishmen understood it, some in the broadest west-country vernacular, some in parti-coloured transition between the two, while one at times wielded a language known to himself alone. Most were men of mark in their time, but none of them great men of letters. Meanwhile home-keeping Scotsmen were becoming more and more familiar with that larger literature-now no longer foreign -to which their own was contributory; English books of all kinds, religious as well as secular, were standard reading in Scotland, where Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress were not read as the work of aliens.

(JAMES

The Marquis of Montrose GRAHAM; 1612-50), the brilliant royalist soldier, whose loyalty, after six meteoric victories, brought him disastrous defeat and death on the scaffold, was an apt scholar of St Andrews University, an accomplished man of the world, and the author of a few passionately loyal poems. Unhappily, by far the most memorable-containing two thricefamous verses-was not definitely ascribed to him till 1711, when it was printed in Watson's Collection of Scots Poems, and cannot be proved his. At most it is an adaptation of an old English song.

Napier, Montrose's biographer, interprets what seems to be a spirited love-poem as a political allegory, in which King Charles I. is the lover and the kingdom the mistress.

I'll Never Love Thee More.
My dear and only love, I pray
That little world of thee
Be governed by no other sway
Than purest monarchy;
For if confusion have a part,

Which virtuous souls abhor,
And hold a synod in thine heart,
I'll never love thee more.

As Alexander I will reign,

And I will reign alone;
My thoughts did ever more disdain
A rival on my throne.

He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
That dares not put it to the touch

To gain or lose it all.

But I will reign and govern still,

And always give the law,
And have each subject at my will,
And all to stand in awe ;
But 'gainst my batteries if I find

Thou kick, or vex me sore,
As that thou set me up a blind,
I'll never love thee more.

And in the empire of thine heart,
Where I should solely be,
If others do pretend a part,

Or dare to vie with me;
Or committees if thou erect,

And go on such a score,
I'll laugh and sing at thy neglect,

And never love thee more.

But if thou wilt prove faithful, then,
And constant of thy word,
I'll make thee glorious by my pen,
And famous by my sword;
I'll serve thee in such noble ways
Was never heard before;

I'll crown and deck thee all with bays,
And love thee more and more.

Lines written after Sentence of Death.
Let them bestow on every airt a limb, quarter of heaven
Then open all my veins, that I may swim
To Thee, my Maker, in that crimson lake;
Then place my par-boiled head upon a stake,
Scatter my ashes, strew them in the air:
Lord! since Thou know'st where all those atoms are,
I'm hopeful Thou 'lt recover once my dust,
And confident Thou 'lt raise me with the just!

See the selections from Montrose and Marvell by R. S. Rait (1901). 'Ile never love thee more' is an old Northern (i.e. North English) tune of the reign of James I., and the oldest set of words-one of many sets to the same air-belongs to the early years of the seventeenth century:

'My dear and only love, take heed

How thou thyself expose;
And let not longing lovers feed
Upon such looks as those.

I'll marble thee around about,

And build without a door;

But if my love doth once break out,
I'll never love thee more.'

Simion Grahame, son of an Edinburgh burgess, was a competent scholar, a soldier and traveller of dissolute life, and ultimately an austere Franciscan brother. He must have been born about 1570; Dempster-a poor authority-fixes the end of his very varied career in 1614, probably too early. He spent the last years of his life in Italy. He dedicated to his patron, James VI., a collection of verses called The Passionate Sparke of a Relenting Mind in 1604, and in 1609 to the Earl of Montrose (father of the famous Marquis) his Anatomie of Humors-a dedication which may justify us in introducing him in this section along with his patron's son. The most notable thing about the Anatomie is that it has been conjectured to have given Burton more than a suggestion for his Anatomie of Melancholy. The work, interspersed with verse, gives striking pictures of typical charactersquacks, parasites, and many others-somewhat in the fashion of the 'characters' of Hall and Overbury. He wrote in what is approximately English of the period; but undisguised and unmistakable Scotticisms in words, spellings, and construction appear constantly. Love is, as usual, the humour most elaborately anatomised, and was especially fair game for a friar. This is a fragment on the lover :

Being alone in their retearing [retiring] walks they surfat the solitarie deserts with the sorrowful voice of a discontented minde, with weeping eies in splaine [spleen, a fit] of passion. O, saieth he,

The furious force of love's consuming fire

No tyme can quench, nor thoght can not expell:
Such is the restles rage of my desire,
Which makes my wits within myselfe rebell:

Thus am I wrongd and ever saikles slaine, blameless
I shift my place but cannot shift my paine.

They ever esteeme their paines worse than the paines of hell; such are the sort of penitentiall lovers, who are alwaies anatomisd with humorous follie: and yet how often it coms to passe that they who taks most pains to please are most displeasd, for it is knowne be unfallable experience that the duetifull lover in a respected persute is often rejected with many ingratfull disdains. ... How perrillous it is to beleeve a Lover, how tempting their words will be, and how they will straine them selves to speak with vehemencie. Lady Rethorick ever hants the mouth of a Lover, and with borrowed speeches of braver wits doeth enlarge their deceit, his perjured promises, his oathes, his vowes, his protestations, his waiting-on, and all his iron sences drawen to feed upon the attractive humors of her Adamantall beautie. Her smile is his heaven, and her frowne is his hell: she is the only

idoll of his minde, for when he should serve God, he worships her; if he comes to Church, his looking on her behaviour takes away his hearing, robs him of devotion, and makes him a sencelesse blocke; with staring on her face he learns the arte of Physiognomie, his vain apprehentions will reade a woman's thought in her visage; and when he lookes on her hands, O then hee becomes a rare Palmister, for he will not spare to reade her fortunes by lynes, for heere (says hee) is the true score of death, and there goes the score of life. . . . Hee spendes the time in his Chamber with no other thing but with a great Looking-glasse, how to take off his hatt, how to make his gesture, and in a discourse how to frame the motion of his hands, to kisse his finger, to make courtesie with his legge, to set his arme, to smile, to looke aside, to walke; and then he stands gazing on the full proportion of his own bodie, which I sweare is not else but the very true image of superstitious vanitie.

There are two forms of a poem written from Italy, thus beginning, and addressed

To Scotland his Soyle.

To thee, my Soyle, where first
I did receive my breath,
These obsequies I sing

Before my Swan-like death.
My love by nature bound,

Which spotlesse love I spend, From treasure of my hart

To Thee I recommend.

And he praised the United Kingdom in another, much longer and more elaborate, in which he takes opportunity to congratulate and compliment the king as the good genius of the now united realm: With nine-voyc'd mouth my Delphin song I sound; Of all the world blest bee thou, Brittaine's Ile! Thou, onely thou, within this mortall round, On whom the heav'ns have lov'd so long to smile: For Phoenix-like thou hast renew'd thy kinde, In getting that which lay for thee inshrin'de.

Robert Sempill of Beltrees in the Renfrewshire parish of Lochwinnoch (1595 ?-1659), humorous poet, was the son of Sir James Sempill of Beltrees, himself son of Lord Sempill, and so distantly related to the older Robert Sempill, author of the Sempill Ballates (see page 232). Sir James was contemptuously called by Knox 'the dancer' from his various social accomplishments; was conspicuous at the court of James VI., whom he assisted in the preparation of the Basilicon Doron; and wrote controversial works on the Presbyterian side, as well as the satirical poem against the Catholic Church, The Packman's Paternoster. His son Robert continued this satire, wrote various pieces, but is remembered as author of the Life and Death of Habbie Simson, Piper of Kilbarchan, which gives a graphic and humorous account of old Scottish amusements. Both Ramsay and Burns were influenced by this poem, and copied the form of verse, which became characteristic of Scottish vernacular poems, especially those of facetious type.