[In Much Ado about Nothing."] Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more; Men were deceivers ever; One foot in sea, and one on shore, But let them go, Sing no more ditties, sing no more [In Cymbeline.'] Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages: To thee the reed is as the oak. The sceptre, learning, physic, must All follow this, and come to dust. Fear no more the lightning-flash, Nor th' all-dreaded thunder stone; Fear not slander, censure rash, Thou hast finished joy and moan. No exorciser harm thee! SIR JOHN DAVIES (1570-1626), an English barrister, at one time Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, was the author of a long philosophical poem, On the Soul of Man and the Immortality thereof, supposed to have been written in 1598, and one of the earliest poems of that kind in our language. Davies is a profound thinker and close reasoner: in the happier parts of his poem,' says Campbell, 'we come to logical truths so well illustrated by ingenious similes, that we know not whether to call the thoughts more poetically or philosophically just. The judgment and fancy are reconciled, and the imagery of the poem seems to start more vividly from the surrounding shades of abstraction.' The versification of the poem (long quatrains), was afterwards copied by Davenant and Dryden. Mr Southey has remarked that Sir John Davies and Sir William Davenant, avoiding equally the opposite faults of too artificial and too careless a style, wrote in numbers which, for precision, and clearness, and felicity, and strength, have never been surpassed.' The compact structure of Davies's verse is indeed remarkable for his times. In another production, entitled Orchestra, or a Poem of Dancing, in a Dialogue between Penelope and One of her Wooers, he is much more fanciful. He there represents Penelope as declining to dance with Antinous, and the latter as proceeding to lecture her upon the antiquity of that elegant exercise, the merits of which he describes in verses partaking, as has been justly remarked, of the flexibility and grace of the subject. The following is one of the most imaginative passages: [The Dancing of the Air.] And now behold your tender nurse, the air, Now in, now out, in time and measure true; And yet her hearing sense is nothing quick, And thou, sweet Music, dancing's only life, The soft mind's paradise, the sick mind's leech, That when the air doth dance her finest measure, Lastly, where keep the Winds their revelry, Where she herself is turn'd a hundred ways, Afterwards, the poet alludes to the tidal influence of the moon, and the passage is highly poetical in expression: For lo, the sea that fleets about the land, And like a girdle clips her solid waist, Sometimes his proud green waves in order set, The poem on Dancing is said to have been written in fifteen days. It was published in 1596. The Nosce Teipsum, or Poem on the Immortality of the Soul, bears the date (as appears from the dedication to the Queen) of 1602. The fame of these works introduced Sir John Davies to James I., who made him successively solicitor-general and attorney-general for Ireland. He was also a judge of assize, and was knighted by the king in 1607. The first Reports of Law Cases, published in Ireland, were made by this able and accomplished man, and his preface to the volume is considered the best that was ever prefixed to a law-book.' [Reasons for the Soul's Immortality.] Again, how can she but immortal be, And never rests till she attain to it! All moving things to other things do move Of the same kind, which shows their nature such ; Yet nature so her streams doth lead and carry At first her mother earth she holdeth dear, For who did ever yet, in honour, wealth, Then, as a bee which among weeds doth fall, [The Dignity of Man.] Oh! what is man, great Maker of mankind! That thou to him so great respect dost bear; That thou adorn'st him with so bright a mind, Mak'st him a king, and even an angel's peer! Oh! what a lively life, what heav'nly pow'r, How great, how plentiful, how rich a dow'r What spreading virtue, what a sparkling fire, Dost thou within this dying flesh inspire! Thou leav'st thy print in other works of thine, But thy whole image thou in man hast writ; There cannot be a creature more divine, Except, like thee, it should be infinite: But it exceeds man's thought, to think how high God hath rais'd man, since God a man became ; The angels do admire this mystery, And are astonish'd when they view the same: Nor hath he given these blessings for a day, Nor made them on the body's life depend; The soul, though made in time, survives for aye; And though it hath beginning, sees no end. JOHN DONNE. JOHN DONNE was born in London in 1573, of a Catholic family; through his mother he was related to Sir Thomas More and Heywood the epigrammatist. He was educated partly at Oxford and partly at Cambridge, and was designed for the law, but relinquished the study in his nineteenth year. About this period of his life, having carefully considered the controversies between the Catholics and Protestants, he became convinced that the latter were right, and became a member of the established church. The great abilities and amiable character of Donne were early distinguished. The Earl of Essex, the Lord Chancellor Egerton, and Sir Robert Drury, successively befriended and employed him; and a saying of the second of these eminent persons respecting him is recorded by his biographers-that he was fitter to serve a king than a subject. He fell, nevertheless, into trouble, in consequence of secretly marrying the daughter of Sir George Moore, lord lieutenant of the Tower. This step kept him for several years in poverty, and by the death of his wife, a few days after giving birth to her twelfth child, he was plunged into the greatest grief. At the age of forty-two, Donne became a clergyman, and soon attaining distinction as a preacher, he was preferred by James I. to the deanery of St Paul's; in which benefice he continued till his death in 1631, when he was buried honourably in Westminster Abbey. The works of Donne consist of satires, elegies, religious poems, complimentary verses, and epigrams: they were first collected into one volume by Tonson in 1719. His reputation as a poet, great in his own day, low during the latter part of the seventeenth, and the whole of the eighteenth centuries, has latterly in some degree revived. In its days of abasement, critics spoke of his harsh and rugged versification, and his leaving nature for conceit: Dryden even hints at the necessity of translating him into numbers and English. It seems to be now acknowledged that, amidst much rubbish, there is much real poetry, and that of a high order, in Donne. He is described by a recent critic as 'imbued to saturation with the learning of his age,' endowed with a most active and piercing intellect -an imagination, if not grasping and comprehensive, most subtle and far-darting-a fancy, rich, vivid, and picturesque a mode of expression terse, simple, and condensed-and a wit admirable, as well for its caustic severity, as for its playful quickness -and as only wanting sufficient sensibility and taste to preserve him from the vices of style which seem Monumental Effigy of Dr Donne. to have beset him. Donne is usually considered as the first of a series of poets of the seventeenth century, who, under the name of the Metaphysical Poets, fill a conspicuous place in Erglish literary nistory. The directness of thought, the naturalness of description, the rich abundance of genuine poetical feeling and imagery, which distinguish the poets of Elizabeth's reign, now begin to give way to cold and forced conceits, merc vain workings of the intellect, a kind of poetry as unlike the former as punning is unlike genuine wit. To give an idea of these conceits-Donne writes a poem on a familiar popular subject, a broken heart. Here he does not advert to the miseries or distractions which are presumed to be the causes of broken hearts, but starts off into a play of conceit upon the phrase. He entered a room, he says, where his mistress was present, and love, alas! At one first blow did shiver it [his heart] as glass. Then, forcing on his mind to discover by what means the idea of a heart broken to pieces, like glass, can be turned to account in making out something that will gingle on the reader's imagination, he proceeds thus: Yet nothing can to nothing fall, Those pieces still, though they do not unite: A hundred lesser faces, so My rags of heart can like, wish, and adore, There is here, certainly, analogy, but then it is an analogy which altogether fails to please or move: it is a mere conceit. Perhaps we should not be far from the truth, if we were to represent this style as the natural symptoms of the decline of the brilliant school of Sackville, Spenser, and Shakspeare. All the recognised modes, subjects, and phrases of poetry, introduced by them and their contemporaries, were now in some degree exhausted, and it was necessary to seek for something new. This was found, not in a new vein of equally rich ore, but in a continuation of the workings through adjoining veins of spurious metal. It is at the same time to be borne in mind, that the quality above described did not characterise the whole of the writings of Donne and his followers. These men are often direct, natural, and truly poetical-in spite, as it were, of themselves. Donne, it may be here stated, is usually considered as the first writer of that kind of satire which Pope and Churchill carried to such perfection. But his satires, to use the words of a writer already quoted, are rough and rugged as the unhewn stones that have just been blasted from the quarry. The specimens which follow are designed only to exemplify the merits of Donne, not his defects: Valediction-Forbidding Mourning. As virtuous men pass mildly away, Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, Careless eyes, lips, and hands to miss. If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two; That is, absence. And though it in the centre sit, Before I sigh my last gasp, let me breathe, before. My constancy I to the planets give; My truth to them who at the court do live; To Jesuits; to Buffoons my pensiveness; 1 Thou, Love, taught'st me, by appointing me My faith I give to Roman Catholics; Only to give to those that count my gifts indignity. I give my reputation to those Which were my friends; mine industry to foes; To Nature all that I in rhyme have writ! And to my company my wit: Thou, Love, by making me adore Her who begot this love in me before, Stranger than seven antiquaries' studies- Sleeveless his jerkin was, and it had been See it plain rash awhile, then not at all. The thing hath travell'd, and saith, speaks all tongues; But pedants' motley tongue, soldiers' bombast, He names me, and comes to me. I whisper, God! Of our two academies, I named. Here To Babel's bricklayers, sure the tower had stood.' To teach by painting drunkards doth not last Taught'st me to make as though I gave, when I do but No more can prince's courts (though there be few restore. To him for whom the passing bell next tolls I give my physic books; my written rolls Of moral counsels I to Bedlam give; My brazen medals, unto them which live In want of bread; to them which pass among All foreigners, my English tongue: Thou, Love, by making me love one For younger lovers, dost my gifts thus disproportion. Therefore I'll give no more, but I'll undo Thou, Love, taught'st me, by making me Better pictures of vice) teach me virtue.' He, like a high-stretch'd lutestring, squeak'd, 'O, Sir, 'Tis sweet to talk of kings! At Westminster, (Said I) the man that keeps the Abbey-tombs, And, for his price, doth, with whoever comes, Of all our Harrys and our Edwards talk, He smack'd and cry'd-' He's base, mechanic, coarse, To invent and practise this one way to annihilate all Crossing hurt me. To fit my sullenness three. [A Character from Donne's Satires.] A thing more strange than on Nile's slime the sun He to another key his style doth dress, When the queen frown'd or smil'd, and he knows what He knows who hath sold his land, and now doth beg JOSEPH HALL. JOSEPH HALL, born at Bristow Park, in Leicestershire, in 1574, and who rose through various church preferments to be bishop of Norwich, is more distinguished as a prose writer than as a poet: he is, however, allowed to have been the first to write satirical verse with any degree of elegance. His satires, which were published under the title of Virgidemiarum, in 1597-9, refer to general objects, and present some just pictures of the more remarkable anomalies in human character: they are also written in a style of greater polish and volubility than most of the compositions of this age. Bishop Hall, of whom a more particular notice is given elsewhere, died in 1656, at the age of eighty-two. [Selections from Hall's Satires.] A gentle squire would gladly entertain Third, that he never change his trencher twice. Seest thou how gaily my young master goes,* Than stake his twelvepence to a meaner host. *This is the portrait of a poor gallant of the days of Elizabeth. In St Paul's Cathedral, then an open public place, there was a tomb erroneously supposed to be that of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, which was the resort of gentlemen upon town in that day, who had occasion to look out for a dinner. When unsuccessful in getting an invitation, they were said to dine with Duke Humphrey. An allusion to the church service to be heard near Duke Humphrey's tomb. So nothing in his maw? yet seemeth by his belt, BEN JONSON. In 1616, BEN JONSON collected the plays he had then written, and published them in one volume, folio, adding, at the same time, a book of epigrams, and a number of poems, which he entitled The Forest, and The Underwood. The whole were comprised in one folio volume, which Jonson dignified with the title of his Works, a circumstance which exposed him to the ridicule of some of his contemporaries.* It is only with the minor poetry of Jonson that we have to deal at present, as the dramatic productions of this stern old master of the manly school of English comedy will be afterwards described. There is much delicacy of fancy, fine feeling, and sentiment, in some of Jonson's lyrical and descriptive effusions. He grafted a classic grace and musical expression on parts of his masques and interludes, which could hardly have been expected from his massive and ponderous hand. In some of his songs he equals Carew and Herrick in picturesque images, and in portraying the fascinations of love. A taste for nature is strongly displayed in his fine lines on Penshurst, that ancient seat of the Sidneys. It has been justly remarked by one of his critics, that Jonson's dramas do not lead us to value highly enough his admirable taste and feeling in poetry; and when we consider how many other intellectual excellences distinguished him-wit, observation, judgment, memory, learning-we must acknowledge that the inscription on his tomb, “O rare Ben Jonson !" is not more pithy than it is true.' |