A History of Elizabethan Literature Part 18

Ha! I can stand thee: nearer, nearer it.

What a mockery hath death made thee! thou look'st sad.

In what place art thou? in yon starry gallery?

Or in the cursed dungeon?--No? not speak?

Pray, sir, resolve me, what religion's best For a man to die in? or is it in your knowledge To answer me how long I have to live?

That's the most necessary question.

Not answer? are you still like some great men That only walk like shadows up and down, And to no purpose? Say:--

[_The Ghost throws earth upon him and shows him the skull._

What's that? O, fatal! he throws earth upon me!

A dead man's skull beneath the roots of flowers!-- I pray [you], speak, sir: our Italian Church-men Make us believe dead men hold conference With their familiars, and many times Will come to bed to them, and eat with them.

[_Exit_ GHOST.

He's gone; and see, the skull and earth are vanished.

This is beyond melancholy. I do dare my fate To do its worst. Now to my sister's lodging And sum up all these horrors: the disgrace The prince threw on me; next the piteous sight Of my dead brother; and my mother's dotage; And last this terrible vision: all these Shall with Vittoria's bounty turn to good, Or I will drown this weapon in her blood."

[_Exit._

_The d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi_ is to my thinking very inferior--full of beauties as it is. In the first place, we cannot sympathise with the d.u.c.h.ess, despite her misfortunes, as we do with the "White Devil." She is neither quite a virtuous woman (for in that case she would not have resorted to so much concealment) nor a frank professor of "All for Love." Antonio, her so-called husband, is an unromantic and even questionable figure. Many of the minor characters, as already hinted, would be much better away. Of the two brothers the Cardinal is a cold-blooded and uninteresting debauchee and murderer, who sacrifices sisters and mistresses without any reasonable excuse. Ferdinand, the other, is no doubt mad enough, but not interestingly mad, and no attempt is made to account in any way satisfactorily for the delay of his vengeance. By common consent, even of the greatest admirers of the play, the fifth act is a kind of gratuitous appendix of horrors stuck on without art or reason. But the extraordinary force and beauty of the scene where the d.u.c.h.ess is murdered; the touches of poetry, pure and simple, which, as in the _The White Devil_, are scattered all over the play; the fantastic acc.u.mulation of terrors before the climax; and the remarkable character of Bosola,--justify the high place generally a.s.signed to the work. True, Bosola wants the last touches, the touches which Shakespere would have given. He is not wholly conceivable as he is. But as a "Plain Dealer" gone wrong, a "Malcontent" (Webster's work on that play very likely suggested him), turned villain, a man whom ill-luck and fruitless following of courts have changed from a cynic to a scoundrel, he is a strangely original and successful study. The dramatic flashes in the play would of themselves save it. "I am d.u.c.h.ess of Malfi still," and the other famous one "Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young," often as they have been quoted, can only be quoted again. They are of the first order of their kind, and, except the "already _my_ De Flores!" of _The Changeling_, there is nothing in the Elizabethan drama out of Shakespere to match them.

There is no doubt that some harm has been done to Thomas Heywood by the enthusiastic phrase in which Lamb described him as "a prose Shakespere."

The phrase itself is in the original quite carefully and sufficiently explained and qualified. But unluckily a telling description of the kind is sure to go far, while its qualifications remain behind; and (especially since a reprint by Pearson in the year 1874 made the plays of Heywood, to which one or two have since been added more or less conjecturally by the industry of Mr. Bullen, accessible as a whole) a certain revolt has been manifested against the encomium. This revolt is the effect of haste. "A prose Shakespere" suggests to incautious readers something like Swift, like Taylor, like Carlyle,--something approaching in prose the supremacy of Shakespere in verse. But obviously that is not what Lamb meant. Indeed when one remembers that if Shakespere is anything, he is a poet, the phrase may run the risk of receiving an under--not an over--valuation. It is evident, however, to any one who reads Lamb's remarks in full and carefully--it is still more evident to any one who without much caring what Lamb or any one else has said, reads Heywood for himself--what he did mean. He was looking only at one or two sides of the myriad-sided one, and he justly saw that Heywood touched Shakespere on these sides, if only in an incomplete and unpoetic manner. What Heywood has in common with Shakespere, though his prosaic rather than poetic treatment brings it out in a much less brilliant way, is his sympathy with ordinary and domestic character, his aversion from the fantastic vices which many of his fellows were p.r.o.ne to attribute to their characters, his humanity, his kindness. The reckless tragedy of blood and ma.s.sacre, the reckless comedy of revelry and intrigue, were always repulsive to him, as far as we can judge from the comparatively scanty remnant of the hundreds of plays in which he boasted that he had had a hand, if not a chief hand. Besides these plays (he confesses to authors.h.i.+p or collaboration in two hundred and twenty) he was a voluminous writer in prose and verse, though I do not myself pretend to much knowledge of his non-dramatic work. Its most interesting part would have been a _Lives of the Poets_, which we know that he intended, and which could hardly have failed to give much information about his famous contemporaries. As it is, his most remarkable and best-known work, not contained in one of his dramas, is the curious and constantly quoted pa.s.sage half complaining that all the chief dramatists of his day were known by abbreviations of their names, but characteristically and good-humouredly ending with the license--

"I hold he loves me best who calls me Tom."

We have unfortunately no knowledge which enables us to call him many names except such as are derived from critical examination of his works. Little, except that he is said to have been a Lincolns.h.i.+re man and a Fellow of Peterhouse, is known of his history. His masterpiece, _The Woman killed with Kindness_ (in which a deceived husband, coming to the knowledge of his shame, drives his rival to repentance, and his wife to repentance and death, by his charity), is not wholly admirable. Shakespere would have felt, more fully than Heywood, the danger of presenting his hero something of a wittol without sufficient pa.s.sion of religion or affection to justify his tolerance. But the pathos is so great, the sense of "the pity of it" is so simply and unaffectedly rendered, that it is impossible not to rank Heywood very high. The most famous "beauties" are in the following pa.s.sage:--

_Anne._ "O with what face of bra.s.s, what brow of steel, Can you unblus.h.i.+ng speak this to the face Of the espoused wife of so dear a friend?

It is my husband that maintains your state, Will you dishonour him that in your power Hath left his whole affairs? I am his wife, Is it to _me_ you speak?

_Wendoll._ "O speak no more: For more than this I know and have recorded Within the red-leaved table of my heart.

Fair and of all beloved, I was not fearful Bluntly to give my life unto your hand, And at one hazard all my worldly means.

Go, tell your husband; he will turn me off And I am then undone: I care not, I, 'Twas for your sake. Perchance in rage he'll kill me; I care not, 'twas for you. Say I incur The general name of villain through the world, Of traitor to my friend. I care not, I.

Beggary, shame, death, scandal and reproach For you I'll hazard all--why, what care I?

For you I'll live and in your love I'll die."

Anne capitulates with a suddenness which has been generally and rightly p.r.o.nounced a blot on the play; but her husband is informed by a servant and resolves to discover the pair. The action is prolonged somewhat too much, and the somewhat unmanly strain of weakness in Frankford is too perceptible; but these scenes are full of fine pa.s.sages, as this:--

_Fr._ "A general silence hath surprised the house, And this is the last door. Astonishment, Fear and amazement beat[55] upon my heart Even as a madman beats upon a drum.

O keep my eyes, you heavens, before I enter, From any sight that may transfix my soul: Or if there be so black a spectacle, O strike mine eyes stark blind! Or if not so, Lend me such patience to digest my grief That I may keep this white and virgin hand From any violent outrage, or red murder, And with that prayer I enter."

[55] First ed. "Play," which I am half inclined to prefer.

A subsequent speech of his--

"O G.o.d, O G.o.d that it were possible To undo things done,"

hardly comes short of the touch which would have given us instead of a prose Shakespere a Shakespere indeed; and all the rest of the play, as far as the main plot is concerned, is full of pathos.

In the great number of other pieces attributed to him, written in all the popular styles, except the two above referred to, merits and defects are mixed up in a very curious fas.h.i.+on. Never sinking to the lowest depth of the Elizabethan playwright, including some great ones, Heywood never rises to anything like the highest height. His chronicle plays are very weak, showing no grasp of heroic character, and a most lamentable slovenliness of rhythm. Few things are more curious than to contrast with _Henry VI._ (to which some critics will allow little of Shakespere's work) and _Richard III._ the two parts of _Edward IV._, in which Heywood, after a manner, fills the gap. There are good lines here and there, and touching traits; but the whole, as a whole, is quite ludicrously bad, and "written to the gallery," the City gallery, in the most innocent fas.h.i.+on. _If You Know Not Me You Know n.o.body_, or _The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth_, also in two parts, has the same curious innocence, the same prosaic character, but hardly as many redeeming flashes. Its first part deals with Elizabeth's real "troubles," in her sister's days; its second with the Armada period and the founding of the Royal Exchange. For Heywood, unlike most of the dramatists, was always true to the City, even to the eccentric extent of making, in _The Four Prentices of London_, G.o.dfrey of Bouillon and his brethren members of the prentice-brotherhood. His cla.s.sical and allegorical pieces, such as _The Golden Age_ and its fellows, are most tedious and not at all brief. The four of them (_The Iron Age_ has two parts) occupy a whole volume of the reprint, or more than four hundred closely printed pages; and their clumsy dramatisation of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, with any other cla.s.sical learning that Heywood could think of thrust in, presents (together with various minor pieces of a somewhat similar kind) as striking a contrast with _Troilus and Cressida_, as _Edward IV._ does with _Henry VI._ His spectacles and pageants, chiefly in honour of London (_London's Jus Honorarium_, with other metaphorical Latin t.i.tles of the same description) are heavy, the weakness of his versification being especially felt in such pieces. His strength lies in the domestic and contemporary drama, where his pathos had free play, unrestrained by the necessity of trying to make it rise to chivalrous or heroic height, and where his keen observation of his fellow-men made him true to mankind in general, at the same time that he gave a vivid picture of contemporary manners. Of this cla.s.s of his plays _A Woman killed with Kindness_ is undoubtedly the chief, but it has not a few companions, and those in a sufficiently wide and varied cla.s.s of subject. _The Fair Maid of the Exchange_ is, perhaps, not now found to be so very delectable and full of mirth as it is a.s.serted to be on its t.i.tle-page, because it is full of that improbability and neglect of verisimilitude which has been noted as the curse of the minor Elizabethan drama. The "Cripple of Fenchurch," the real hero of the piece, is a very unlikely cripple; the heroines chop and change their affections in the most surprising manner; and the characters generally indulge in that curious self-description and soliloquising in dialogue which is never found in Shakespere, and is found everywhere else. But it is still a lively picture of contemporary manners. We should be sorry to lose _The Fair Maid of the West_ with its picture of Devons.h.i.+re sailors, foreign merchants, kings of Fez, Bashaws of various parts, Italian dukes, and what not. The two parts make anything but a good play, but they are decidedly interesting, and their tone supports Mr. Bullen's conjecture that we owe to Heywood the, in parts, admirable play of _d.i.c.k of Devons.h.i.+re_, a dramatisation of the quarter-staff feats in Spain of Richard Peake of Tavistock. _The English Traveller_ may rank with _A Woman killed with Kindness_ as Heywood's best plays (there is, indeed, a certain community of subject between them), but _A Maidenhead well Lost_, and _The Witches of Lancas.h.i.+re_, are not far behind it; nor is _A Challenge for Beauty_. We can hardly say so much for _Love's Mistress_, which dramatises the story of _Cupid and Psyche_, or for _The Wise Woman of Hogsdon_ (Hoxton), a play rather of Middleton's type. But in _The Royal King and Loyal Subject_, and in _Fortune by Land and Sea_, the author shows again the sympathy with chivalrous character and adventure which (if he never can be said to be fully up to its level in the matter of poetic expression) was evidently a favourite and constant motive with him. In short, Heywood, even at his worst, is a writer whom it is impossible not to like. His very considerable talent, though it stopped short of genius, was united with a pleasant and genial temper, and little as we know of his life, his dedications and prefaces make us better acquainted with his personality than we are with that of much more famous men.

No greater contrast is possible than that between our last two names--Day and Tourneur. Little is known of them: Day was at Cambridge in 1592-3; Tourneur shared in the Cadiz voyage of 1625 and died on its return. Both, it is pretty certain, were young men at the end of Elizabeth's reign, and were influenced strongly by the literary fas.h.i.+ons set by greater men than themselves. But whereas Day took to the graceful fantasticalities of Lyly and to the not very savage social satire of Greene, Tourneur (or Turner) addressed himself to the most ferocious school of sub-Marlovian tragedy, and to the rugged and almost unintelligible satire of Marston. Something has been said of his effort in the latter vein, the _Transformed Metamorphosis_. His two tragedies, _The Atheist's Tragedy_ and _The Revenger's Tragedy_, have been rather variously judged. The concentration of gloomy and almost insane vigour in _The Revenger's Tragedy_, the splendid poetry of a few pa.s.sages which have long ago found a home in the extract books, and the less separable but equally distinct poetic value of scattered lines and phrases, cannot escape any competent reader. But, at the same time, I find it almost impossible to say anything for either play as a whole, and here only I come a long way behind Mr. Swinburne in his admiration of our dramatists. The _Atheist's Tragedy_ is an inextricable imbroglio of tragic and comic scenes and characters, in which it is hardly possible to see or follow any clue; while the low extravagance of all the comedy and the frantic rant of not a little of the tragedy combine to stifle the real pathos of some of the characters. _The Revenger's Tragedy_ is on a distinctly higher level; the determination of Vindice to revenge his wrongs, and the n.o.ble and hapless figure of Castiza, could not have been presented as they are presented except by a man with a distinct strain of genius, both in conception and execution. But the effect, as a whole, is marred by a profusion of almost all the worst faults of the drama of the whole period from Peele to Davenant. The incoherence and improbability of the action, the reckless, inartistic, butcherly prodigality of blood and horrors, and the absence of any kind of redeeming interest of contrasting light to all the shade, though very characteristic of a cla.s.s, and that no small one, of Elizabethan drama, cannot be said to be otherwise than characteristic of its faults. As the best example (others are _The Insatiate Countess_, Chettle's _Hoffmann_, _l.u.s.t's Dominion_, and the singular production which Mr. Bullen has printed as _The Distracted Emperor_) it is very well worth reading, and contrasting with the really great plays of the same cla.s.s, such as _The Jew of Malta_ and _t.i.tus Andronicus_, where, though the horrors are still overdone, yet genius has given them a kind of pa.s.sport. But intrinsically it is mere nightmare.

Of a very different temper and complexion is the work of John Day, who may have been a Cambridge graduate, and was certainly a student of Gonville and Caius, as he describes himself on the t.i.tle-page of some of his plays and of a prose tract printed by Mr. Bullen. He appears to have been dead in 1640, and the chief thing positively known about him is that between the beginning of 1598 and 1608 he collaborated in the surprising number of twenty-one plays (all but _The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_ unprinted) with Haughton, Chettle, Dekker, and others. _The Parliament of Bees_, his most famous and last printed work, is of a very uncommon kind in English--being a sort of dramatic allegory, touched with a singularly graceful and fanciful spirit. It is indeed rather a masque than a play, and consists, after the opening Parliament held by the Master, or Viceroy Bee (quaintly appearing in the original, which may have been printed in 1607, though no copy seems now discoverable earlier than 1641, as "Mr. Bee"), of a series of characters or sketches of Bee-vices and virtues, which are very human. The termination, which contains much the best poetry in the piece, and much the best that Day ever wrote, introduces King Oberon giving judgment on the Bees from "Mr. Bee" downwards and banis.h.i.+ng offenders. Here occurs the often-quoted pa.s.sage, beginning--

"And whither must these flies be sent?"

and including the fine speech of Oberon--

"You should have cried so in your youth."

It should be observed that both in this play and elsewhere pa.s.sages occur in Day which seem to have been borrowed or stolen from or by other writers, such as Dekker and Samuel Rowley; but a charitable and not improbable explanation of this has been found in the known fact of his extensive and intricate collaboration. _The Isle of Gulls_, suggested in a way by the _Arcadia_, though in general plan also fantastic and, to use a much abused but decidedly convenient word, pastoral, has a certain flavour of the comedy of manners and of contemporary satire. Then we have the quaint piece of _Humour out of Breath_, a kind of study in the for once conjoined schools of Shakespere and Jonson--an attempt at a combination of humorous and romantic comedy with some pathetic writing, as here:--

"[O] Early sorrow art got up so soon?

What, ere the sun ascendeth in the east?

O what an early waker art thou grown!

But cease discourse and close unto thy work.

Under this drooping myrtle will I sit, And work awhile upon my corded net; And as I work, record my sorrows past, Asking old Time how long my woes shall last.

And first--but stay! alas! what do I see?

Moist gum-like tears drop from this mournful tree; And see, it sticks like birdlime; 'twill not part, Sorrow is even such birdlime at my heart.

Alas! poor tree, dost thou want company?

Thou dost, I see't, and I will weep with thee; Thy sorrows make me dumb, and so shall mine, It shall be tongueless, and so seem like thine.

Thus will I rest my head unto thy bark, Whilst my sighs ease my sorrows."

Something the same may be said of _Law Tricks_, or _Who would have Thought it?_ which has, however, in the character of the Count Horatio, a touch of tragedy. Another piece of Day's is in quite a different vein, being an account in dramatised form of the adventures of the three brothers s.h.i.+rley--a kind of play which, from _Sir Thomas Stukeley_ downwards, appears to have been a very favourite one with Elizabethan audiences, though (as might indeed be expected) it was seldom executed in a very successful manner. Lastly, or first, if chronological order is taken, comes _The Blind Beggar of Bethnal Green_, written by Day in conjunction with Chettle, and ranging itself with the half historical, half romantic plays which were, as has been pointed out above, favourites with the first school of dramatists. It seems to have been very popular, and had a second and third part, not now extant, but is by no means as much to modern taste as some of the others. Indeed both Day and Tourneur, despite the dates of their pieces, which, as far as known, are later, belong in more ways than one to the early school, and show how its traditions survived alongside of the more perfect work of the greater masters. Day himself is certainly not a great master--indeed masterpieces would have been impossible, if they would not have been superfluous, in the brisk purveying of theatrical matter which, from Henslowe's accounts, we see that he kept up. He had fancy, a good deal of wit, considerable versatility, and something of the same suns.h.i.+ny temper, with less of the pathos, that has been noticed in Heywood. If he wrote _The Maid's Metamorphosis_ (also ascribed conjecturally to Lyly), he did something less dramatically good, but perhaps poetically better, than his other work; and if, as has sometimes been thought,[56] _The Return from Parna.s.sus_ is his, he is richer still.

But even without these, his existing poetical baggage (the least part of the work which we know he accomplished) is more than respectable, and shows more perhaps than that of any other distinctly minor writer the vast amount of loose talent--of miscellaneous inspiration--which was afloat in the air of his time.

[56] I agree with Professor Hales in thinking it very improbable.

CHAPTER VIII

THE SCHOOL OF SPENSER AND THE TRIBE OF BEN

The reign of James I. is not, in mere poetry, quite such a brilliant period as it is in drama. The full influence of Donne and of Jonson, which combined to produce the exquisite if not extraordinarily strong school of Caroline poets, did not work in it. Of its own bards the best, such as Jonson himself and Drayton, were survivals of the Elizabethan school, and have accordingly been antic.i.p.ated here. Nevertheless, there were not a few verse-writers of mark who may be most conveniently a.s.signed to this time, though, as was the case with so many of their contemporaries, they had sometimes produced work of note before the accession of the British Solomon, and sometimes continued to produce it until far into the reign of his son. Especially there are some of much mark who fall to be noticed here, because their work is not, strictly speaking, of the schools that flourished under Elizabeth, or of the schools that flourished under Charles. We shall not find anything of the first interest in them; yet in one way or in another there were few of them who were unworthy to be contemporaries of Shakespere.

Joshua Sylvester is one of those men of letters whom accident rather than property seems to have made absurd. He has existed in English literature chiefly as an Englisher of the Frenchman Du Bartas, whom an even greater ignorance has chosen to regard as something grotesque. Du Bartas is one of the grandest, if also one of the most unequal, poets of Europe, and Joshua Sylvester, his translator, succeeded in keeping some of his grandeur if he even added to his inequality. His original work is insignificant compared with his translation; but it is penetrated with the same qualities. He seems to have been a little deficient in humour, and his portrait--crowned with a singularly stiff laurel, throated with a stiffer ruff, and clothed, as to the bust, with a doublet so stiff that it looks like textile armour--is not calculated to diminish the popular ridicule. Yet is Sylvester not at all ridiculous. He was certainly a Kentish man, and probably the son of a London clothier. His birth is guessed, on good grounds, at 1563; and he was educated at Southampton under the famous refugee, Saravia, to whom he owed that proficiency in French which made or helped his fame. He did not, despite his wishes, go to either university, and was put to trade. In this he does not seem to have been prosperous; perhaps he gave too much time to translation. He was probably patronised by James, and by Prince Henry certainly. In the last years of his life he was resident secretary to the English company of Merchant Venturers at Middleburgh, where he died on the 28th September 1618. He was not a fortunate man, but his descendants seem to have flourished both in England, the West Indies and America. As for his literary work, it requires no doubt a certain amount of good will to read it. It is voluminous, even in the original part not very original, and constantly marred by that loquacity which, especially in times of great inspiration, comes upon the uninspired or not very strongly inspired. The point about Sylvester, as about so many others of his time, is that, unlike the minor poets of our day and of some others, he has constant flashes--constant hardly separable, but quite perceivable, sc.r.a.ps, which show how genially heated the brain of the nation was. Nor should it be forgotten that his Du Bartas had a great effect for generations. The man of pure science may regret that generations should have busied themselves about anything so thoroughly unscientific; but with that point of view we are unconcerned. The important thing is that the generations in question learnt from Sylvester to take a poetical interest in the natural world.

John Davies of Hereford, who must have been born at about the same time as Sylvester, and who certainly died in the same year, is another curiosity of literature. He was only a writing-master,--a professor of the curious, elaborate penmans.h.i.+p which is now quite dead,--and he seems at no time to have been a man of wealth. But he was, in his vocation or otherwise, familiar with very interesting people, both of the fas.h.i.+onable and the literary cla.s.s. He succeeded, poor as he was, in getting thrice married to ladies born; and, though he seems to have been something of a c.o.xcomb, he was apparently as little of a fool as c.o.xcombry will consist with. His work (of the most miscellaneous character and wholly in verse, though in subject as well as treatment often better suiting prose) is voluminous, and he might have been wholly treated (as he has already been referred to) with the verse pamphleteers, especially Rowlands, of an earlier chapter. But fluent and unequal as his verse is--obviously the production of a man who had little better to offer than journalism, but for whom the times did not provide the opening of a journalist--there is a certain salt of wit in it which puts him above the mere pamphleteers. His epigrams (most of which are contained in _The Scourge of Folly_, undated, like others of his books) are by no means despicable; the Welsh ancestors, whom he did not fail to commemorate, seem to have endowed him with some of that faculty for lampooning and "flyting" which distinguished the Celtic race. That they are frequently lacking in point ought hardly to be objected to him; for the age had construed the miscellaneous examples of Martial indulgently, and Jonson in his own generation, and Herrick after him (two men with whom Davies cannot compare for a moment in general power), are in their epigrams frequently as pointless and a good deal coa.r.s.er. His variations on English proverbs are also remarkable. He had a respectable vein of religious moralising, as the following sonnet from _Wit's Pilgrimage_ will show:--

"When Will doth long to effect her own desires, She makes the Wit, as va.s.sal to the will, To do what she, howe'er unright, requires, Which wit doth, though repiningly, fulfil.

Yet, as well pleased (O languis.h.i.+ng wit!) He seems to effect her pleasure willingly, And all his reasons to her reach doth fit; So like the world, gets love by flattery.

That this is true a thousand witnesses, Impartial conscience, will directly prove; Then if we would not willingly transgress, Our will should swayed be by rules of love, Which holds the mult.i.tude of sins because Her sin morally to him his servants draws."

The defect of Davies, as of not a few of his contemporaries, is that, having the power of saying things rememberable enough, he set himself to wrap them up and merge them in vast heaps of things altogether unrememberable. His successors have too often resembled him only in the latter part of his gift. His longer works (_Mirum in Modum_, _Summa Totalis_, _Microcosmus_, _The Holy Rood_, _Humours Heaven on Earth_, are some of their eccentric t.i.tles) might move simple wonder if a century which has welcomed _The Course of Time_, and _Yesterday, To-day, and For Ever_, not to mention examples even more recent than these, had any great reason to throw stones at its forerunners. But to deal with writers like Davies is a little difficult in a book which aims both at being nothing if not critical, and at doing justice to the minor as well as to the major luminaries of the time: while the difficulty is complicated by the necessity of _not_ saying ditto to the invaluable labourers who have reintroduced him and others like him to readers. I am myself full of the most unfeigned grat.i.tude to my friend Dr. Grosart, to Professor Arber, and to others, for sparing students, whose time is the least disposable thing they have, visits to public libraries or begging at rich men's doors for the sight of books. I should be very sorry both as a student and as a lover of literature not to possess Davies, Breton, Sylvester, Quarles, and the rest, and not to read them from time to time. But I cannot help warning those who are not professed students of the subject that in such writers they have little good to seek; I cannot help noting the difference between them and other writers of a very different order, and above all I cannot help raising a mild protest against the encomiums which are sometimes pa.s.sed on them. Southey, in that nearly best of modern books uncla.s.sified, _The Doctor_, has a story of a glover who kept no gloves that were not "Best." But when the facts came to be narrowly inquired into, it was found that the ingenious tradesman had no less than five qualities--"Best,"