Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

There are people who cannot taste olives—and I cannot much relish Ben Jonson, though I have taken some pains to do it, and went to the task with every sort of good will. I do not deny his power or his merit; far from it: but it is to me of a repulsive and unamiable kind. He was a great man in himself, but one cannot readily sympathise with him. His works, as the characteristic productions of an individual mind, or as records of the manners of a particular age, cannot be valued too highly; but they have little charm for the mere general reader. Schlegel observes, that whereas Shakspeare gives the springs of human nature, which are always the same, or sufficiently so to be interesting and intelligible; Jonson chiefly gives the _humours_ of men, as connected with certain arbitrary or conventional modes of dress, action, and expression, which are intelligible only while they last, and not very interesting at any time. Shakspeare’s characters are men; Ben Jonson’s are more like machines, governed by mere routine, or by the convenience of the poet, whose property they are. In reading the one, we are let into the minds of his characters, we see the play of their thoughts, how their humours flow and work: the author takes a range over nature, and has an eye to every object or occasion that presents itself to set off and heighten the ludicrous character he is describing. His humour (so to speak) bubbles, sparkles, and finds its way in all directions, like a natural spring. In Ben Jonson it is, as it were, confined in a leaden cistern, where it stagnates and corrupts; or directed only through certain artificial pipes and conduits, to answer a given purpose. The comedy of this author is far from being ‘lively, audible, and full of vent:’ it is for the most part obtuse, obscure, forced, and tedious. He wears out a jest to the last shred and coarsest grain. His imagination fastens instinctively on some one mark or sign by which he designates the individual, and never lets it go, for fear of not meeting with any other means to express himself by. A cant phrase, an odd gesture, an old-fashioned regimental uniform, a wooden leg, a tobacco-box, or a hacked sword, are the standing topics by which he embodies his characters to the imagination. They are cut and dried comedy; the letter, not the spirit of wit and humour. Each of his characters has a particular cue, a professional badge which he wears and is known by, and by nothing else. Thus there is no end of Captain Otter, his Bull, his Bear, and his Horse, which are no joke at first, and do not become so by being repeated twenty times. It is a mere matter of fact, that some landlord of his acquaintance called his drinking cups by these ridiculous names; but why need we be told so more than once, or indeed at all? There is almost a total want of variety, fancy, relief, and of those delightful transitions which abound, for instance, in Shakspeare’s tragi-comedy. In Ben Jonson, we find ourselves generally in low company, and we see no hope of getting out of it. He is like a person who fastens upon a disagreeable subject, and cannot be persuaded to leave it. His comedy, in a word, has not what Shakspeare somewhere calls ‘bless’d conditions.’ It is cross-grained, mean, and mechanical. It is handicraft wit. Squalid poverty, sheer ignorance, bare-faced impudence, or idiot imbecility, are his dramatic common-places—things that provoke pity or disgust, instead of laughter. His portraits are caricatures by dint of their very likeness, being extravagant tautologies of themselves; as his plots are improbable by an excess of consistency; for he goes thoroughstitch with whatever he takes in hand, makes one contrivance answer all purposes, and every obstacle give way to a predetermined theory. For instance, nothing can be more incredible than the mercenary conduct of Corvino, in delivering up his wife to the palsied embraces of Volpone; and yet the poet does not seem in the least to boggle at the incongruity of it: but the more it is in keeping with the absurdity of the rest of the fable, and the more it advances it to an incredible catastrophe, the more he seems to dwell upon it with complacency and a sort of wilful exaggeration, as if it were a logical discovery or corollary from well-known premises. He would no more be baffled in the working out a plot, than some people will be baffled in an argument. ‘If to be wise were to be obstinate,’ our author might have laid signal claim to this title. Old Ben was of a scholastic turn, and had dealt a little in the occult sciences and controversial divinity. He was a man of strong crabbed sense, retentive memory, acute observation, great fidelity of description and keeping in character, a power of working out an idea so as to make it painfully true and oppressive, and with great honesty and manliness of feeling, as well as directness of understanding: but with all this, he wanted, to my thinking, that genial spirit of enjoyment and finer fancy, which constitute the essence of poetry and of wit. The sense of reality exercised a despotic sway over his mind, and equally weighed down and clogged his perception of the beautiful or the ridiculous. He had a keen sense of what was true and false, but not of the difference between the agreeable and disagreeable; or if he had, it was by his understanding rather than his imagination, by rule and method, not by sympathy, or intuitive perception of ‘the gayest, happiest attitude of things.’ There was nothing spontaneous, no impulse or ease about his genius: it was all forced, up-hill work, making a toil of a pleasure. And hence his overweening admiration of his own works, from the effort they had cost him, and the apprehension that they were not proportionably admired by others, who knew nothing of the pangs and throes of his Muse in child-bearing. In his satirical descriptions he seldom stops short of the lowest and most offensive point of meanness; and in his serious poetry he seems to repose with complacency only on the pedantic and far-fetched, the _ultima Thule_ of his knowledge. He has a conscience of letting nothing escape the reader that he knows. _Aliquando sufflaminandus erat_, is as true of him as it was of Shakspeare, but in a quite different sense. He is doggedly bent upon fatiguing you with a favourite idea; whereas, Shakspeare overpowers and distracts attention by the throng and indiscriminate variety of his. His Sad Shepherd is a beautiful fragment. It was a favourite with the late Mr. Horne Tooke: indeed it is no wonder, for there was a sort of sympathy between the two men. Ben was like the modern wit and philosopher, a grammarian and a hard-headed thinker.—There is an amusing account of Ben Jonson’s private manners in Howel’s Letters, which is not generally known, and which I shall here extract.

‘_From James Howel, Esq. to Sir Thomas Hawk, Kt._

_Westminster, 5th April, 1636._

‘Sir,

‘I was invited yesternight to a solemn supper by B. J. where you
were deeply remembered; there was good company, excellent cheer,
choice wines, and jovial welcome: one thing intervened, which almost
spoiled the relish of the rest, that B. began to engross all the
discourse, to vapour extremely of himself, and, by vilifying others,
to magnify his own Muse. T. Ca. (Tom Carew) buzzed me in the ear,
that though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it
seems he had not read the ethics, which, among other precepts of
morality, forbid self-commendation, declaring it to be an
ill-favoured solecism in good manners. It made me think upon the
lady (not very young) who having a good while given her guests neat
entertainment, a capon being brought upon the table, instead of a
spoon, she took a mouthful of claret, and spouted into the hollow
bird: such an accident happened in this entertainment: you
know—_Propria laus sordet in ore_: be a man’s breath ever so sweet,
yet it makes one’s praise stink, if he makes his own mouth the
conduit-pipe of it. But for my part I am content to dispense with
the Roman infirmity of Ben, now that time hath snowed upon his
pericranium. You know Ovid and (your) Horace were subject to this
humour, the first bursting out into—

_Jamque opus exegi, quod nec Jovis ira nec ignis, &c._

the other into—

_Exegi monumentum ære perennius, &c._

As also Cicero, while he forced himself into this hexameter: _O
fortunatam natam, me consule Romam!_ There is another reason that
excuseth B. which is, that if one be allowed to love the natural
issue of his body, why not that of the brain, which is of a
spiritual and more noble extraction?’

The concurring testimony of all his contemporaries agrees with his own candid avowal, as to Ben Jonson’s personal character. He begins, for instance, an epistle to Drayton in these words—

‘Michael, by some ’tis doubted if I be
A friend at all; or if a friend, to thee.’

Of Shakspeare’s comedies I have already given a detailed account, which is before the public, and which I shall not repeat of course: but I shall give a cursory sketch of the principal of Ben Jonson’s.—The Silent Woman is built upon the supposition of an old citizen disliking noise, who takes to wife Epicene (a supposed young lady) for the reputation of her silence, and with a view to disinherit his nephew, who has laughed at his infirmity; when the ceremony is no sooner over than the bride turns out a very shrew, his house becomes a very Babel of noises, and he offers his nephew his own terms to unloose the matrimonial knot, which is done by proving that Epicene is no woman. There is some humour in the leading character, but too much is made out of it, not in the way of Moliere’s exaggerations, which, though extravagant, are fantastical and ludicrous, but of serious, plodding, minute prolixity. The first meeting between Morose and Epicene is well managed, and does not ‘o’erstep the modesty of nature,’ from the very restraint imposed by the situation of the parties—by the affected taciturnity of the one, and the other’s singular dislike of noise. The whole story, from the beginning to the end, is a gratuitous assumption, and the height of improbability. The author, in sustaining the weight of his plot, seems like a balance-master who supports a number of people, piled one upon another, on his hands, his knees, his shoulders, but with a great effort on his own part, and with a painful effect to the beholders. The scene between Sir Amorous La Foole and Sir John Daw, in which they are frightened by a feigned report of each other’s courage, into a submission to all sorts of indignities, which they construe into flattering civilities, is the same device as that in Twelfth Night between Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Viola, carried to a paradoxical and revolting excess. Ben Jonson had no idea of decorum in his dramatic fictions, which Milton says is the principal thing, but went on caricaturing himself and others till he could go no farther in extravagance, and sink no lower in meanness. The titles of his _dramatis personæ_, such as Sir Amorous La Foole, Truewit, Sir John Daw, Sir Politic Would-be, &c. &c. which are significant and knowing, shew his determination to overdo every thing by thus letting you into their characters beforehand, and afterwards proving their pretensions by their names. Thus Peregrine, in Volpone, says, ‘Your name, Sir? _Politick._ My name is Politick Would-be.’ To which Peregrine replies, ‘Oh, that speaks him.’ How it should, if it was his real name, and not a nick-name given him on purpose by the author, is hard to conceive. This play was Dryden’s favourite. It is indeed full of sharp, biting sentences against the women, of which he was fond. The following may serve as a specimen. Truewit says, ‘Did I not tell thee, Dauphine? Why, all their actions are governed by crude opinion, without reason or cause: they know not why they do any thing; but, as they are informed, believe, judge, praise, condemn, love, hate, and in emulation one of another, do all these things alike. Only they have a natural inclination sways ’em generally to the worst, when they are left to themselves.’ This is a cynical sentence; and we may say of the rest of his opinions, that ‘even though we should hold them to be true, yet it is slander to have them so set down.’ The women in this play indeed justify the author’s severity; they are altogether abominable. They have an utter want of principle and decency, and are equally without a sense of pleasure, taste, or elegance. Madame Haughty, Madame Centaur, and Madame Mavis, form the College, as it is here pedantically called. They are a sort of candidates for being upon the town, but cannot find seducers, and a sort of blue-stockings, before the invention of letters. Mistress Epicene, the silent gentlewoman, turns out not to be a woman at all; which is not a very pleasant _denouement_ of the plot, and is itself an incident apparently taken from the blundering blindman’s-buff conclusion of the Merry Wives of Windsor. What Shakspeare might introduce by an accident, and as a mere passing jest, Ben Jonson would set about building a whole play upon. The directions for making love given by Truewit, the author’s favourite, discover great knowledge and shrewdness of observation, mixed with the acuteness of malice, and approach to the best style of comic dialogue. But I must refer to the play itself for them.

The Fox, or Volpone, is his best play. It is prolix and improbable, but intense and powerful. It is written _con amore_. It is made up of cheats and dupes, and the author is at home among them. He shews his hatred of the one and contempt for the other, and makes them set one another off to great advantage. There are several striking dramatic contrasts in this play, where the Fox lies _perdue_ to watch his prey, where Mosca is the dextrous go-between outwitting his gulls, his employer, and himself, and where each of the gaping legacy-hunters, the lawyer, the merchant, and the miser, eagerly occupied with the ridiculousness of the other’s pretensions, is blind only to the absurdity of his own: but the whole is worked up too mechanically, and our credulity overstretched at last revolts into scepticism, and our attention overtasked flags into drowsiness. This play seems formed on the model of Plautus, in unity of plot and interest; and old Ben, in emulating his classic model, appears to have done his best. There is the same caustic unsparing severity in it as in his other works. His patience is tried to the utmost. His words drop gall.

‘Hood an ass with reverend purple,
So you can hide his too ambitious ears,
And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.’

The scene between Volpone, Mosca, Voltore, Corvino, and Corbaccio, at the outset, will shew the dramatic power in the conduct of this play, and will be my justification in what I have said of the literal tenaciousness (to a degree that is repulsive) of the author’s imaginary descriptions.

Every Man in his Humour, is a play well-known to the public. This play acts better than it reads. The pathos in the principal character, Kitely, is ‘as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.’ There is, however, a certain good sense, discrimination, or logic of passion in the part, which affords excellent hints for an able actor, and which, if properly pointed, gives it considerable force on the stage. Bobadil is the only actually striking character in the play, and the real hero of the piece. His well-known proposal for the pacification of Europe, by killing some twenty of them, each his man a day, is as good as any other that has been suggested up to the present moment. His extravagant affectation, his blustering and cowardice, are an entertaining medley; and his final defeat and exposure, though exceedingly humorous, are the most affecting part of the story. Brain-worm is a particularly dry and abstruse character. We neither know his business nor his motives: his plots are as intricate as they are useless, and as the ignorance of those he imposes upon is wonderful. This is the impression in reading it. Yet from the bustle and activity of this character on the stage, the changes of dress, the variety of affected tones and gipsy jargon, and the limping affected gestures, it is a very amusing theatrical exhibition. The rest, Master Matthew, Master Stephen, Cob and Cob’s wife, were living in the sixteenth century. That is all we all know of them. But from the very oddity of their appearance and behaviour, they have a very droll and even picturesque effect when acted. It seems a revival of the dead. We believe in their existence when we see them. As an example of the power of the stage in giving reality and interest to what otherwise would be without it, I might mention the scene in which Brain-worm praises Master Stephen’s leg. The folly here is insipid from its being seemingly carried to an excess, till we see it; and then we laugh the more at it, the more incredible we thought it before.

Bartholomew Fair is chiefly remarkable for the exhibition of odd humours and tumbler’s tricks, and is on that account amusing to read once.—The Alchymist is the most famous of this author’s comedies, though I think it does not deserve its reputation. It contains all that is quaint, dreary, obsolete, and hopeless in this once-famed art, but not the golden dreams and splendid disappointments. We have the mere circumstantials of the sublime science, pots and kettles, aprons and bellows, crucibles and diagrams, all the refuse and rubbish, not the essence, the true _elixir vitæ_. There is, however, one glorious scene between Surly and Sir Epicure Mammon, which is the finest example I know of dramatic sophistry, or of an attempt to prove the existence of a thing by an imposing description of its effects; but compared with this, the rest of the play is a _caput mortuum_. The scene I allude to is the following:

‘_Mammon._ Come on, Sir. Now, you set your foot on shore, In _Novo Orbe_; here’s the rich Peru: And there within, Sir, are the golden mines, Great Solomon’s Ophir! He was sailing to ‘t Three years, but we have reached it in ten months. This is the day wherein, to all my friends, I will pronounce the happy word, BE RICH; This day you shall be Spectatissimi. You shall no more deal with the hollow dye, Or the frail card. * * * * * * * * You shall start up young viceroys, And have your punks and punketees, my Surly, And unto thee, I speak it first, BE RICH. Where is my Subtle, there? Within, ho!

_Face._ [_within_] Sir, he’ll come to you, by and by.

_Mam._ That is his Firedrake, His Lungs, his Zephyrus, he that puffs his coals, Till he firk nature up in her own centre. You are not faithful, Sir. This night I’ll change All that is metal in my house to gold: And early in the morning, will I send To all the plumbers and the pewterers And buy their tin and lead up; and to Lothbury, For all the copper.

_Surly._ What, and turn that too?

_Mam._ Yes, and I’ll purchase Devonshire and Cornwall, And make them perfect Indies! You admire now?

_Surly._ No, faith.

_Mam._ But when you see th’ effects of the great medicine, Of which one part projected on a hundred Of Mercury, or Venus, or the Moon, Shall turn it to as many of the Sun; Nay, to a thousand, so _ad infinitum_; You will believe me.

_Surly._ Yes, when I see’t, I will—

_Mam._ Ha! why? Do you think I fable with you? I assure you, He that has once the flower of the Sun, The perfect ruby, which we call Elixir, Not only can do that, but, by its virtue, Can confer honour, love, respect, long life; Give safety, valour, yea, and victory, To whom he will. In eight and twenty days, I’ll make an old man of fourscore, a child.

_Surly._ No doubt; he’s that already.

_Mam._ Nay, I mean, Restore his years, renew him, like an eagle, To the fifth age; make him get sons and daughters, Young giants; as our philosophers have done, The ancient patriarchs, afore the flood, But taking, once a week, on a knife’s point, The quantity of a grain of mustard of it; Become stout Marses, and beget young Cupids.

* * * * *

You are incredulous.

_Surly._ Faith, I have a humour, I would not willingly be gull’d. Your stone Cannot transmute me.

_Mam._ Pertinax Surly, Will you believe antiquity? records? I’ll shew you a book where Moses and his sister, And Solomon have written of the art; Ay, and a treatise penn’d by Adam—

_Surly._ How!

_Mam._ Of the philosopher’s stone, and in High Dutch.

_Surly._ Did Adam write, Sir, in High Dutch?

_Mam._ He did; Which proves it was the primitive tongue.

* * * * *

[_Enter Face, as a servant._

How now!
Do we succeed? Is our day come, and holds it?

_Face._ The evening will set red upon you, Sir: You have colour for it, crimson; the red ferment Has done his office: three hours hence prepare you To see projection.

_Mam._ Pertinax, my Surly, Again I say to thee, aloud, Be rich. This day thou shalt have ingots; and to-morrow Give lords the affront. * * * * Where’s thy master?

_Face._ At his prayers, Sir, he; Good man, he’s doing his devotions For the success.

_Mam._ Lungs, I will set a period To all thy labours; thou shalt be the master Of my seraglio ... For I do mean To have a list of wives and concubines Equal with Solomon: * * * * I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft: Down is too hard; and then, mine oval room Fill’d with such pictures as Tiberius took From Elephantis, and dull Aretine But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse And multiply the figures, as I walk. * * * My mists I’ll have of perfume, vapoured about the room To lose ourselves in; and my baths, like pits To fall into: from whence we will come forth, And roll us dry in gossamer and roses. Is it arriv’d at ruby? Where I spy A wealthy citizen, or a rich lawyer, Have a sublimed pure wife, unto that fellow I’ll send a thousand pound to be my cuckold.

_Face._ And I shall carry it?

_Mam._ No. I’ll have no bawds. But fathers and mothers. They will do it best, Best of all others. And my flatterers Shall be the pure and gravest of divines That I can get for money. We will be brave, Puffe, now we have the medicine. My meat shall all come in, in Indian shells, Dishes of agat set in gold, and studded With emeralds, sapphires, hyacinths, and rubies. The tongues of carps, dormice, and camel’s heels Boil’d in the spirit of Sol, and dissolv’d pearl, Apicius’ diet, ’gainst the epilepsy; And I will eat these broths with spoons of amber, Headed with diamond and carbuncle. My footboys shall eat pheasants, calver’d salmons, Knots, godwits, lampreys; I myself will have The beards of barbels serv’d instead of salads; Oil’d mushrooms; and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Drest with an exquisite and poignant sauce; For which I’ll say unto my cook, _There’s gold, Go forth, and be a knight_.

_Face._ Sir, I’ll go look A little, how it heightens.

_Mam._ Do. My shirts I’ll have of taffeta-sarsnet, soft and light, As cobwebs; and for all my other raiment, It shall be such as might provoke the Persian, Were he to teach the world riot anew. My gloves of fishes and birds’ skins, perfum’d With gums of Paradise and eastern air.

_Surly._ And do you think to have the stone with this?

_Mam._ No, I do think t’ have all this with the stone.

_Surly._ Why, I have heard, he must be _homo frugi_, A pious, holy, and religious man, One free from mortal sin, a very virgin.

_Mam._ That makes it, Sir, he is so; but I buy it. My venture brings it me. He, honest wretch, A notable, superstitious, good soul, Has worn his knees bare, and his slippers bald, With prayer and fasting for it, and, Sir, let him Do it alone, for me, still; here he comes; Not a profane word afore him: ’tis poison.’

_Act II. scene I._

I have only to add a few words on Beaumont and Fletcher. Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, the Chances, and the Wild Goose Chase, the original of the Inconstant, are superior in style and execution to any thing of Ben Jonson’s. They are, indeed, some of the best comedies on the stage; and one proof that they are so, is, that they still hold possession of it. They shew the utmost alacrity of invention in contriving ludicrous distresses, and the utmost spirit in bearing up against, or impatience and irritation under them. Don John, in the Chances, is the heroic in comedy. Leon, in Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, is a fine exhibition of the born gentleman and natural fool: the Copper Captain is sterling to this hour: his mistress, Estifania, only died the other day with Mrs. Jordan: and the two grotesque females, in the same play, act better than the Witches in Macbeth.

LECTURE III
ON COWLEY, BUTLER, SUCKLING, ETHEREGE, &C.

The metaphysical poets or wits of the age of James and Charles I. whose style was adopted and carried to a more dazzling and fantastic excess by Cowley in the following reign, after which it declined, and gave place almost entirely to the poetry of observation and reasoning, are thus happily characterised by Dr. Johnson.

‘The metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavour: 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 τέχνη μιμητικὴ, _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 any thing; they neither copied nature nor life; neither painted the forms of matter, nor represented the operations of intellect.’

The whole of the account is well worth reading: it was a subject for which Dr. Johnson’s powers both of thought and expression were better fitted than any other man’s. If he had had the same capacity for following the flights of a truly poetic imagination, or for feeling the finer touches of nature, that he had felicity and force in detecting and exposing the aberrations from the broad and beaten path of propriety and common sense, he would have amply deserved the reputation he has acquired as a philosophical critic.

The writers here referred to (such as Donne, Davies, Crashaw, and others) not merely mistook learning for poetry—they thought any thing was poetry that differed from ordinary prose and the natural impression of things, by being intricate, far-fetched, and improbable. Their style was not so properly learned as metaphysical; that is to say, whenever, by any violence done to their ideas, they could make out an abstract likeness or possible ground of comparison, they forced the image, whether learned or vulgar, into the service of the Muses. Any thing would do to ‘hitch into a rhyme,’ no matter whether striking or agreeable, or not, so that it would puzzle the reader to discover the meaning, and if there was the most remote circumstance, however trifling or vague, for the pretended comparison to hinge upon. They brought ideas together not the most, but the least like; and of which the collision produced not light, but obscurity—served not to strengthen, but to confound. Their mystical verses read like riddles or an allegory. They neither belong to the class of lively or severe poetry. They have not the force of the one, nor the gaiety of the other; but are an ill-assorted, unprofitable union of the two together, applying to serious subjects that quaint and partial style of allusion which fits only what is light and ludicrous, and building the most laboured conclusions on the most fantastical and slender premises. The object of the poetry of imagination is to raise or adorn one idea by another more striking or more beautiful: the object of these writers was to match any one idea with any other idea, _for better for worse_, as we say, and whether any thing was gained by the change of condition or not. The object of the poetry of the passions again is to illustrate any strong feeling, by shewing the same feeling as connected with objects or circumstances more palpable and touching; but here the object was to strain and distort the immediate feeling into some barely possible consequence or recondite analogy, in which it required the utmost stretch of misapplied ingenuity to trace the smallest connection with the original impression. In short, the poetry of this period was strictly the poetry not of ideas, but of _definitions_: it proceeded in mode and figure, by _genus_ and specific difference; and was the logic of the schools, or an oblique and forced construction of dry, literal matter-of-fact, decked out in a robe of glittering conceits, and clogged with the halting shackles of verse. The imagination of the writers, instead of being conversant with the face of nature, or the secrets of the heart, was lost in the labyrinths of intellectual abstraction, or entangled in the technical quibbles and impertinent intricacies of language. The complaint so often made, and here repeated, is not of the want of power in these men, but of the waste of it; not of the absence of genius, but the abuse of it. They had (many of them) great talents committed to their trust, richness of thought, and depth of feeling; but they chose to hide them (as much as they possibly could) under a false shew of learning and unmeaning subtlety. From the style which they had systematically adopted, they thought nothing done till they had perverted simplicity into affectation, and spoiled nature by art. They seemed to think there was an irreconcileable opposition between genius, as well as grace, and nature; tried to do without, or else constantly to thwart her; left nothing to her outward ‘impress,’ or spontaneous impulses, but made a point of twisting and torturing almost every subject they took in hand, till they had fitted it to the mould of their self-opinion and the previous fabrications of their own fancy, like those who pen acrostics in the shape of pyramids, and cut out trees into the shape of peacocks. Their chief aim is to make you wonder at the writer, not to interest you in the subject; and by an incessant craving after admiration, they have lost what they might have gained with less extravagance and affectation. So Cowper, who was of a quite opposite school, speaks feelingly of the misapplication of Cowley’s poetical genius.

‘And though reclaim’d by modern lights
From an erroneous taste,
I cannot but lament thy splendid wit
Entangled in the cobwebs of the schools.’

Donne, who was considerably before Cowley, is without his fancy, but was more recondite in his logic, and rigid in his descriptions. He is hence led, particularly in his satires, to tell disagreeable truths in as disagreeable a way as possible, or to convey a pleasing and affecting thought (of which there are many to be found in his other writings) by the harshest means, and with the most painful effort. His Muse suffers continual pangs and throes. His thoughts are delivered by the Cæsarean operation. The sentiments, profound and tender as they often are, are stifled in the expression; and ‘heaved pantingly forth,’ are ‘buried quick again’ under the ruins and rubbish of analytical distinctions. It is like poetry waking from a trance: with an eye bent idly on the outward world, and half-forgotten feelings crowding about the heart; with vivid impressions, dim notions, and disjointed words. The following may serve as instances of beautiful or impassioned reflections losing themselves in obscure and difficult applications. He has some lines to a Blossom, which begin thus:

‘Little think’st thou, poor flow’r,
Whom I have watched six or seven days,
And seen thy birth, and seen what every hour
Gave to thy growth, thee to this height to raise,
And now dost laugh and triumph on this bough.
Little think’st thou
That it will freeze anon, and that I shall
To-morrow find thee fall’n, or not at all.’

This simple and delicate description is only introduced as a foundation for an elaborate metaphysical conceit as a parallel to it, in the next stanza.

‘Little think’st thou (poor heart
That labour’st yet to nestle thee,
And think’st by hovering here to get a part
In a forbidden or forbidding tree,
And hop’st her stiffness by long siege to bow:)
Little think’st thou,
That thou to-morrow, ere the sun doth wake,
Must with this sun and me a journey take.’

This is but a lame and impotent conclusion from so delightful a beginning.—He thus notices the circumstance of his wearing his late wife’s hair about his arm, in a little poem which is called the Funeral:

‘Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm
Nor question much
That subtle wreath of hair, about mine arm;
The mystery, the sign you must not touch.’

The scholastic reason he gives quite dissolves the charm of tender and touching grace in the sentiment itself—

‘For ’tis my outward soul,
Viceroy to that, which unto heaven being gone,
Will leave this to control,
And keep these limbs, her provinces, from dissolution.’

Again, the following lines, the title of which is Love’s Deity, are highly characteristic of this author’s manner, in which the thoughts are inlaid in a costly but imperfect mosaic-work.

‘_I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost,
Who died before the God of Love was born_:
I cannot think that he, who then lov’d most,
Sunk so low, as to love one which did scorn.
But since this God produc’d a destiny,
And that vice-nature, custom, lets it be;
I must love her that loves not me.’

The stanza in the Epithalamion on a Count Palatine of the Rhine, has been often quoted against him, and is an almost irresistible illustration of the extravagances to which this kind of writing, which turns upon a pivot of words and possible allusions, is liable. Speaking of the bride and bridegroom he says, by way of serious compliment—

‘Here lies a she-Sun, and a he-Moon there,
She gives the best light to his sphere;
Or each is both and all, and so
They unto one another nothing owe.’

His love-verses and epistles to his friends give the most favourable idea of Donne. His satires are too clerical. He shews, if I may so speak, too much disgust, and, at the same time, too much contempt for vice. His dogmatical invectives hardly redeem the nauseousness of his descriptions, and compromise the imagination of his readers more than they assist their reason. The satirist does not write with the same authority as the divine, and should use his poetical privileges more sparingly. ‘To the pure all things are pure,’ is a maxim which a man like Dr. Donne may be justified in applying to himself; but he might have recollected that it could not be construed to extend to the generality of his readers, _without benefit of clergy_.

Bishop Hall’s Satires are coarse railing in verse, and hardly that. Pope has, however, contrived to avail himself of them in some of his imitations.

Sir John Davies is the author of a poem on the Soul, and of one on Dancing. In both he shews great ingenuity, and sometimes terseness and vigour. In the last of these two poems his fancy _pirouettes_ in a very lively and agreeable manner, but something too much in the style of a French opera-dancer, with sharp angular turns, and repeated deviations from the faultless line of simplicity and nature.

Crashaw was a writer of the same ambitious stamp, whose imagination was rendered still more inflammable by the fervors of fanaticism, and who having been converted from Protestantism to Popery (a weakness to which the ‘seething brains’ of the poets of this period were prone) by some visionary appearance of the Virgin Mary, poured out his devout raptures and zealous enthusiasm in a torrent of poetical hyperboles. The celebrated Latin Epigram on the miracle of our Saviour, ‘The water blushed into wine,’ is in his usual _hectic_ manner. His translation of the contest between the Musician and the Nightingale is the best specimen of his powers.

Davenant’s Gondibert is a tissue of stanzas, all aiming to be wise and witty, each containing something in itself, and the whole together amounting to nothing. The thoughts separately require so much attention to understand them, and arise so little out of the narrative, that they with difficulty sink into the mind, and have no common feeling of interest to recal or link them together afterwards. The general style may be judged of by these two memorable lines in the description of the skeleton-chamber.

‘Yet on that wall hangs he too, who so thought,
And she dried by him whom that he obeyed.’

Mr. Hobbes, in a prefatory discourse, has thrown away a good deal of powerful logic and criticism in recommendation of the plan of his friend’s poem. Davenant, who was poet-laureate to Charles II. wrote several masques and plays which were well received in his time, but have not come down with equal applause to us.

Marvel (on whom I have already bestowed such praise as I could, for elegance and tenderness in his descriptive poems) in his satires and witty pieces was addicted to the affected and involved style here reprobated, as in his Flecknoe (the origin of Dryden’s Macflecknoe) and in his satire on the Dutch. As an instance of this forced, far-fetched method of treating his subject, he says, in ridicule of the Hollanders, that when their dykes overflowed, the fish used to come to table with them,

‘And sat not as a meat, but as a guest.’

There is a poem of Marvel’s on the death of King Charles I. which I have not seen, but which I have heard praised by one whose praise is never high but of the highest things, for the beauty and pathos, as well as generous frankness of the sentiments, coming, as they did, from a determined and incorruptible political foe.

Shadwell was a successful and voluminous dramatic writer of much the same period. His Libertine (taken from the celebrated Spanish story) is full of spirit; but it is the spirit of licentiousness and impiety. At no time do there appear to have been such extreme speculations afloat on the subject of religion and morality, as there were shortly after the Reformation, and afterwards under the Stuarts, the differences being widened by political irritation; and the Puritans often over-acting one extreme out of grimace and hypocrisy, as the king’s party did the other out of _bravado_.

Carew is excluded from his pretensions to the laureateship in Suckling’s Sessions of the Poets, on account of his slowness. His verses are delicate and pleasing, with a certain feebleness, but with very little tincture of the affectation of this period. His masque (called _Cœlum Britannicum_) in celebration of a marriage at court, has not much wit nor fancy, but the accompanying prose directions and commentary on the mythological story, are written with wonderful facility and elegance, in a style of familiar dramatic dialogue approaching nearer the writers of Queen Anne’s reign than those of Queen Elizabeth’s.

Milton’s name is included by Dr. Johnson in the list of metaphysical poets on no better authority than his lines on Hobson the Cambridge Carrier, which he acknowledges were the only ones Milton wrote on this model. Indeed, he is the great contrast to that style of poetry, being remarkable for breadth and massiness, or what Dr. Johnson calls ‘aggregation of ideas,’ beyond almost any other poet. He has in this respect been compared to Michael Angelo, but not with much reason: his verses are

——‘inimitable on earth
By model, or by shading pencil drawn.’

Suckling is also ranked, without sufficient warrant, among the metaphysical poets. Sir John was of ‘the court, courtly;’ and his style almost entirely free from the charge of pedantry and affectation. There are a few blemishes of this kind in his works, but they are but few. His compositions are almost all of them short and lively effusions of wit and gallantry, written in a familiar but spirited style, without much design or effort. His shrewd and taunting address to a desponding lover will sufficiently vouch for the truth of this account of the general cast of his best pieces.

‘Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Pr’ythee why so pale?
Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Pr’ythee why so pale?

Why so dull and mute, young sinner?
Pr’ythee why so mute?
Will, when speaking well, can’t win her,
Saying nothing do ‘t?
Pr’ythee why so mute?

Quit, quit for shame, this will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her;
The Devil take her.’

The two short poems against Fruition, that beginning, ‘There never yet was woman made, nor shall, but to be curst,’—the song, ‘I pr’ythee, spare me, gentle boy, press me no more for that slight toy, that foolish trifle of a heart,’—another, ‘’Tis now, since I sat down before, that foolish fort, a heart,’—_Lutea Alanson_—the set of similes, ‘Hast thou seen the down in the air, when wanton winds have tost it,’—and his ‘Dream,’ which is of a more tender and romantic cast, are all exquisite in their way. They are the origin of the style of Prior and Gay in their short fugitive verses, and of the songs in the Beggar’s Opera. His Ballad on a Wedding is his masterpiece, and is indeed unrivalled in that class of composition, for the voluptuous delicacy of the sentiments, and the luxuriant richness of the images. I wish I could repeat the whole, but that, from the change of manners, is impossible. The description of the bride is (half of it) as follows: the story is supposed to be told by one countryman to another:—

‘Her finger was so small, the ring
Would not stay on, which they did bring;
It was too wide a peck:
And to say truth (for out it must)
It look’d like the great collar (just)
About our young colt’s neck.

Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they fear’d the light:
But oh! she dances such a way!
No sun upon an Easter-day
Is half so fine a sight.

* * * * *

Her cheeks so rare a white was on,
No daisy makes comparison,
(Who sees them is undone)
For streaks of red were mingled there,
Such as are on a Cath’rine pear,
(The side that’s next the sun.)

Her lips were red; and one was thin,
Compar’d to that was next her chin;
(Some bee had stung it newly)
But (Dick) her eyes so guard her face,
I durst no more upon them gaze,
Than on the sun in July.

Her mouth so small, when she does speak,
Thoud’st swear her teeth her words did break,
That they might passage get;
But she so handled still the matter,
They came as good as ours, or better,
And are not spent a whit.’

There is to me in the whole of this delightful performance a freshness and purity like the first breath of morning. Its sportive irony never trespasses on modesty, though it sometimes (laughing) threatens to do so! Suckling’s Letters are full of habitual gaiety and good sense. His Discourse on Reason in Religion is well enough meant. Though he excelled in the conversational style of poetry, writing verse with the freedom and readiness, vivacity and unconcern, with which he would have talked on the most familiar and sprightly topics, his peculiar powers deserted him in attempting dramatic dialogue. His comedy of the _Goblins_ is equally defective in plot, wit, and nature; it is a wretched list of _exits_ and _entrances_, and the whole business of the scene is taken up in the unaccountable seizure, and equally unaccountable escapes, of a number of persons from a band of robbers in the shape of goblins, who turn out to be noblemen and gentlemen in disguise. Suckling was not a Grub-street author; or it might be said, that this play is like what he might have written after dreaming all night of duns and a spunging-house. His tragedies are no better: their titles are the most interesting part of them, Aglaura, Brennoralt, and the Sad One.

Cowley had more brilliancy of fancy and ingenuity of thought than Donne, with less pathos and sentiment. His mode of illustrating his ideas differs also from Donne’s in this: that whereas Donne is contented to analyse an image into its component elements, and resolve it into its most abstracted species; Cowley first does this, indeed, but does not stop till he has fixed upon some other prominent example of the same general class of ideas, and forced them into a metaphorical union, by the medium of the generic definition. Thus he says—

‘The Phœnix Pindar is a vast species alone.’

He means to say that he stands by himself: he is then ‘a vast species alone:’ then by applying to this generality the _principium individuationis_, he becomes a Phœnix, because the Phœnix is the only example of a species contained in an individual. Yet this is only a literal or metaphysical coincidence: and literally and metaphysically speaking, Pindar was not a species by himself, but only seemed so by pre-eminence or excellence; that is, from qualities of mind appealing to and absorbing the imagination, and which, therefore, ought to be represented in poetical language, by some other obvious and palpable image exhibiting the same kind or degree of excellence in other things, as when Gray compares him to the Theban eagle,

‘Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air.’

Again, he talks in the Motto, or Invocation to his Muse, of ‘marching the Muse’s Hannibal’ into undiscovered regions. That is, he thinks first of being a leader in poetry, and then he immediately, by virtue of this abstraction, becomes a Hannibal; though no two things can really be more unlike in all the associations belonging to them, than a leader of armies and a leader of the tuneful Nine. In like manner, he compares Bacon to Moses; for in _his_ verses extremes are sure to meet. The Hymn to Light, which forms a perfect contrast to Milton’s Invocation to Light, in the commencement of the third book of Paradise Lost, begins in the following manner:—

‘First-born of Chaos, who so fair didst come
From the old negro’s darksome womb!
Which, when it saw the lovely child,
The melancholy mass put on kind looks, and smil’d.’

* * * * *

And soon after—

‘’Tis, I believe, this archery to show
That so much cost in colours thou,
And skill in painting, dost bestow,
Upon thy ancient arms, the gaudy heav’nly bow.

Swift as light thoughts their empty career run,
Thy race is finish’d when begun;
Let a post-angel start with thee,
And thou the goal of earth shalt reach as soon as he.’

The conceits here are neither wit nor poetry; but a burlesque upon both, made up of a singular metaphorical jargon, verbal generalities, and physical analogies. Thus his calling Chaos, or Darkness, ‘the old negro,’ would do for abuse or jest, but is too remote and degrading for serious poetry, and yet it is meant for such. The ‘old negro’ is at best a nickname, and the smile on its face loses its beauty in such company. The making out the rainbow to be a species of heraldic painting, and converting an angel into a post-boy, shew the same rage for comparison; but such comparisons are as odious as they are unjust. Dr. Johnson has multiplied instances of the same false style, in its various divisions and subdivisions.[4] Of Cowley’s serious poems, the Complaint is the one I like the best; and some of his translations in the Essays, as those on Liberty and Retirement, are exceedingly good. The Odes to Vandyke, to the Royal Society, to Hobbes, and to the latter Brutus, beginning ‘Excellent Brutus,’ are all full of ingenious and high thoughts, impaired by a load of ornament and quaint disguises. The Chronicle, or list of his Mistresses, is the best of his original lighter pieces: but the best of his poems are the translations from Anacreon, which remain, and are likely to remain unrivalled. The spirit of wine and joy circulates in them; and though they are lengthened out beyond the originals, it is by fresh impulses of an eager and inexhaustible feeling of delight. Here are some of them:—

DRINKING

‘The thirsty earth soaks up the rain,
And drinks, and gapes for drink again.
The plants suck in the earth, and are
With constant drinking fresh and fair.
The sea itself, which one would think
Should have but little need of drink,
Drinks twice ten thousand rivers up,
So fill’d that they o’erflow the cup.
The busy sun (and one would guess
By’s drunken fiery face no less)
Drinks up the sea, and, when he ‘as done,
The moon and stars drink up the sun.
They drink and dance by their own light,
They drink and revel all the night.
Nothing in nature’s sober found,
But an eternal health goes round.
Fill up the bowl then, fill it high,
Fill all the glasses there; for why
Should every creature drink but I;
Why, man of morals, tell me why?’

This is a classical intoxication; and the poet’s imagination, giddy with fancied joys, communicates its spirit and its motion to inanimate things, and makes all nature reel round with it. It is not easy to decide between these choice pieces, which may be reckoned among the _delights of human kind_; but that to the Grasshopper is one of the happiest as well as most serious:—

‘Happy insect, what can be
In happiness compar’d to thee?
Fed with nourishment divine,
The dewy morning’s gentle wine!
Nature waits upon thee still,
And thy verdant cup does fill;
’Tis filled wherever thou dost tread,
Nature’s self thy Ganymede.
Thou dost drink, and dance, and sing;
Happier than the happiest king!
All the fields which thou dost see,
All the plants, belong to thee;
All that summer-hours produce,
Fertile made with early juice.
Man for thee does sow and plough,
Farmer he, and landlord thou!
Thou dost innocently joy;
Nor does thy luxury destroy;
The shepherd gladly heareth thee,
More harmonious than he.
Thee country hinds with gladness hear,
Prophet of the ripen’d year!
Thee Phœbus loves, and does inspire;
Phœbus is himself thy sire.
To thee, of all things upon earth,
Life is no longer than thy mirth.
Happy insect, happy thou!
Dost neither age nor winter know;
But, when thou’st drunk, and danc’d, and sung
Thy fill, the flowery leaves among,
(Voluptuous and wise withal,
Epicurean animal!)
Sated with thy summer feast,
Thou retir’st to endless rest.’