CHAPTER IX. THE AFTERMATH. AFTER a resplendent summer, a fruitful autumn; then clouds rise in the sky, and winter tempests loom in the distance. Elizabeth died in 1603; the son of Mary Stuart and Darnley, James VI. of Scotland, I. of England, succeeded her on the throne, and the Elizabethan period continued. It continued but darkened, as autumn continues summer : many fruits, fewer flowers, and these more fragile under a less luminous sky. The moment is a serious one; some grow wiser, others become morose; it seems as though they felt that they belong to a time near its end: youth and summer flowers, adieu, we must hasten and complete our work before we disappear. The day is declining and the storm threatens. Such an one who had been writing "Venus and Adonis," now gives "Macbeth" and "Othello"; another who had won repute by his "Essays," compiles a "Novum Organum"; another who had been riming madrigals at court, writes in solemn style a "History of the World," to while away his time till the hour when he shall mount the scaffold; that other, who had scandalised his friends by the licentiousness of his lyrical verses, is Dean of St. Paul's and edifies them by his sermons. "The pleasantness of the season displeases me. Every 464 thing refreshes and I wither, and I grow older, not better: my strength diminishes, and my load grows. . . .” 1 I Remembrances of summer days and presages of winter mingle in this intermediary period. The abundance and savour of the fruits is as noticeable as the symptoms of impending catastrophes. Many have been the disputes concerning the Bible under Elizabeth: the definitive English version appears in 1611, under the first Stuart; the style is clear, energetic and picturesque, and the work is one of the great monuments of English prose.2 People have rambled through the world, discovered territories, planned colonies, gathered spoils and glory, but there have been no lasting settlements; under James all these efforts bear fruit, and the first permanent English colony in America is established in 1607 on the shores of the Chesapeake, in Virginia, "earth's only paradise," says the royal charter. The men now most conspicuous are graveminded ones: philosophers, savants, discoverers; Bacon, Selden, Napier who invents logarithms and publishes his "Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio" in 1614,3 Harriott, the astronomer and algebraist, Harvey who discovers, about 1616, the general circulation of the blood and prints his "De Motu Cordis "in 1628. People are more addicted to meditation; the school of observation gets the better of the romantic school; what we have noticed on the stage is to be found in every branch of human knowledge; many thinkers, many pensive, nay, melancholy men, so general is the anticipation of impend Donne to Sir H. G[oodere], 1608; "Life and Letters," Gosse, i. 185. * Reprinted as vols. xxxiii. ff. of the “Tudor Translations": "The English Bible translated out of the original tongues by the commandement of King James the First. Anno 1611." 3 Entered in the "Stationers' Registers," as "to be translated into Englishe," January 16, 1615. Arber's Transcript, iii. p. 561. 4 "Artis Analyticæ Praxis ad Equationes algebraicas resolvendas," posthumous, 1631. Stenography, invented years before, had become practical only in 1602, through Willis's "Art of Stenographie," 14th ed., 1647. ing convulsions. Bacon will die in dishonour and Raleigh on the scaffold; Hall will see his episcopal palace and his cathedral sacked, and James himself, the Lord's anointed, king by divine right, far as he was from suspecting the tragical fate in store for his race, could not escape anxieties which have left their trace in his last writings. I. In this later season not one great poet makes himself known. Those who had reached fame under Elizabeth continue to reap their harvest of glory; those who will rise to the highest rank during the forthcoming period are born, grow, learn, and at most print their youthful essays. "'Tis not," Samuel Daniel was writing then, in the pow'r of Kings to raise It seems to the literary traveller that he is traversing an even country with sights scarcely different from those seen before, whilst behind him the Shakespearian sun is setting on inaccessible heights, and the moment has not yet come when, after a darksome dawn, shall glimmer before his steps the light of a day that will be the day of Milton. Roses are always told how fragile they are. They do not receive the gratitude they deserve for ceaselessly budding afresh. They are among the first to bloom in the spring and among the last to linger in the autumn, perfuming our gardens till the coming of winter frosts. During the darkened period we are now reaching, roses continue to do their duty as roses. Shepherds, more numerous than ever, celebrate, with Breton, Drayton, 'Dedication " to the Prince," of "Philotas," Ist ed. 1605. Browne, Wither, Phineas Fletcher, Brathwaite, Brooke, Basse, and many others, the calm, more and more imaginary, of country life. Ambassador Wotton rimes his famous "Character of a Happy Life," a sort of "Beatus ille," in Horatian vein.2 Court poets, less sensible than others of the signs of impending storms, and of the storms themselves, continue the tradition of their elegant, amorous, and disdainful predecessors of Elizabethan days. Retired in his Scottish manor, the royalist Drummond of Hawthornden turns once more to account, with eloquence and as heartily as if they had never done duty before, the sonnet themes of the previous period: sonnet on sleep, on flowers shedding their leaves, on the passing away of time.3 Man's work cannot last, empires crumble, now for the first time "The Poetical Works of W. Basse, 1602-53, collected... by R. W. Bond," London, 1893, 8vo. others, was a pupil of Spenser: "I was Collins loved nine Pastorals, each devoted to a particular virtue true and chaste love, gratitude, etc., each followed by a shepherd's motto and emblem, as in Spenser; three Pastoral Elegies; "Sword and Buckler or the Serving-man's Defence," being a poetical description of servants' duties and hardships. On pastoral literature, see W. W. Greg, "Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama," London, 1906, 8vo, cf. above, vol. II. pp. 469 ff. 2 Written about 1614, e.g. in “Poems of Raleigh . . . and other courtly Poets," ed Hannah, 1892, p. 89. 3 Example, sonnets ii (one of the finest), ix, xxvi; "Poems," ed. W. C. Ward, "Muses Library." 1894, 2 vols. Born in 1585, allied to the Stuarts, through Annabella Drummond, wife of Robert III. and mother of the poetking James I., having studied ar Edinburgh and Paris, William Drummond spent most of his life at Hawthornden, seven miles from Edinburgh, among his books and his scientific apparatus, known to the London men of letters, and receiving, in 1618, the v sit of Ben Jonson above, p. 375). He died in 1649, leaving a "History of Scotland," in prose, pr. 1655, and a quantity of unpublished verses. He had given, eg., "Tears on the Death of Meliades," 1613 (a fine elegy on the death of Prince Henry); Poems, amorous, funerall, divine, pastorall." 1616; "Flowres of Sion [and the] Cypresse Grove," 1623, the latter a prose meditation on death (repr. by Bullen, Stratford-on-Avon, 1907), the former a series of pious poems, part of which had appeared in 1616. Very learned, his works, Jonson told him, "smelling too much of the schooles," he shows, at every turn, evidence of his wide reading: reminiscences of Sidney, Petrarch, Marino, Sannazar, Guarini, Tasso, Ronsard, etc. beauty fades, the "Muses' heavenly lays" will fall into oblivion; it matters not, "I both must write and love": and it seems as if we heard an evanescent echo of Sidney's song, or Ronsard's or Shakespeare's. Cowley, who was to cipher later, in his exile, the despatches exchanged by Charles I. and Henrietta Maria, a poet by the grace of Spenser, whose "Faerie Queene" he had read when a child, takes his inspiration mainly from the clever madrigalists and amourist writers of Elizabethan times. His memory is filled with their inventions, to the extent that it happens to him to insert in his verses some of the most affected conceits scattered by Sidney in the prose of his "Arcadia." He tries to out-do his models, which is always possible, and was greatly admired in his day : On a sigh of pity I a year can live, One tear will keep me twenty at least, An hundred years on one kind word I'll feast... The amo'rous waves would fain about her stay, ... "Bathing in the River" (in his collection of poems called "The Mistress"). Same idea in Sidney, bath of Philoclea in the Ladon: "The upper streams make such haste to have their part of imbracing, that the neather (though lothly) must needs give place unto them," book ii. p. 138, ed. of 1633. Abraham Cowley, 1618-67, printed in 1633 his first verses, and on account especially of his series of love poems, "The Mistress," 1647, enjoyed a brilliant but short-lived fame. Some elegies (on the death of W. Harvey, on that of Crashaw) are among his best works. That on the death of Van Dyck is spoilt by the tiresome multiplicity of his pretty inventions. St. Luke welcomes the painter on his arrival in heaven, Where he beholds new sights divinely fair, Cowley, who had thought at one time of emigrating (" to retire myself to some of our American plantations," not to seek gold, "but to live there in quiet"; "Poems," 1656, sig. a 3), was to make his mark at the Restoration as an essayist, as a savant, and as the author of a "Vision concerning his late pretended Highness Cromwell the Wicked," 1661. "Complete Works in verse and prose," ed. Grosart, 1881. |