the metaphysical imagination since Shakespeare. There we need only a statement of the facts→ pictorial statement, of course, as Hawthorne's could not fail to be—and the effect is complete. Thoroughly to understand a good play and enjoy it, even in the reading, the imagination must body forth its personages, and see them doing or suffering in the visionary theatre of the brain. There, indeed, they are best seen, and Hamlet or Lear loses that ideal quality which makes him typical and universal if he be once compressed within the limits, or associated with the lineaments, of any, even the best, actor.

It is for their poetical qualities, for their gleams of imagination, for their quaint and subtle fancies, for their tender sentiment, and for their charm of diction that these old playwrights are worth reading. They are the best comment also to convince us of the immeasurable superiority of Shakespeare. Several of them, moreover, have been very inadequately edited, or not at all, which is perhaps better; and it is no useless discipline of the wits, no unworthy exercise of the mind, to do our own editing as we go along, winning back to its cradle the right word for the changeling the printers have left in its stead, making the lame verses find their feet again, and rescuing those that have been tumbled higgledypiggledy into a mire of prose. A strenuous study of this kind will enable us better to understand

many a faulty passage in our Shakespeare, and to judge of the proposed emendations of them, or to make one to our own liking. There is no better school for learning English, and for learning it when, in many important respects, it was at its best.

I am not sure that I shall not seem to talk to you of many things that seem trivialities if weighed in the huge business scales of life, but I am always glad to say a word in behalf of what most men consider useless, and to say it the rather because it has so few friends. I have observed, and am sorry to have observed, that English poetry, at least in its older examples, is less read now than when I was young. I do not believe this to be a healthy symptom, for poetry frequents and keeps habitable those upper chambers of the mind that open toward the sun's rising.

I

II

MARLOWE

SHALL preface what I have to say of Marlowe with a few words as to the refinement

which had been going on in the language, and the greater ductility which it had been rapidly gaining, and which fitted it for the use of the remarkable group of men who made an epoch of the reign of Elizabeth. Spenser was undoubtedly the poet to whom we owe most in this respect, and the very great contrast between his Shepherd's Calendar," published in 1579, and his later poems awakens curiosity. In his earliest work there are glimpses, indeed, of those special qualities which have won for him the name of the poet's poet, but they are rare and fugitive, and certainly never would have warranted the prediction of such poetry as was to follow. There is nothing here to indicate that a great artist in language had been born. Two causes, I suspect, were mainly effective in this transformation, I am almost tempted to say transubstantiation, of the man. The first was his practice in translation (true also of Marlowe), than which nothing gives a greater choice and mastery of one's mother tongue, for one must pause and weigh and judge every word with the

greatest nicety, and cunningly transfuse idiom into idiom. The other, and by far the more important, was his study of the Italian poets. The "Faery Queen" is full of loving reminiscence of them, but their happiest influence is felt in his lyrical poems. For these, I think, make it plain that Italy first taught him how much of the meaning of verse is in its music, and trained his ear to a sense of the harmony as well as the melody of which English verse was capable or might be made capable. Compare the sweetest passage in any lyric of the "Shepherd's Calendar" with the eloquent ardor of the poorest, if any be poor, in the "Epithalamion," and we find ourselves in a new world where music had just been invented. This we owe, beyond any doubt, to Spenser's study of the Italian canzone. Nay, the whole metrical movement of the " Epithalamion" recalls that of Petrarca's noble "Spirto gentil." I repeat that melody and harmony were first naturalized in our language by Spenser. I love to recall these debts, for it is pleasant to be grateful even to the dead.

Other men had done their share towards what may be called the modernization of our English, and among these Sir Philip Sidney was conspicuous. He probably gave it greater ease of movement, and seems to have done for it very much what Dryden did a century later in establishing terms of easier intercourse between

the language of literature and the language of cultivated society.

There had been good versifiers long before. Chaucer, for example, and even Gower, wearisome as he mainly is, made verses sometimes not only easy in movement, but in which the language seems strangely modern. That most dolefully dreary of books the " Mirror of Magistrates," and Sackville, more than any of its authors, did something towards restoring the dignity of verse, and helping it to recover its self-respect, while Spenser was still a youth. Tame as it is, the sunshine of that age here and there touches some verse that ripples in the sluggish current with a flicker of momentary illumination. But before Spenser, no English verse had ever soared and sung, or been filled with what Sidney calls" divine delightfulness." Sidney, it may be conjectured, did more by private criticism and argument than by example. Drayton says of him:

"The noble Sidney with this last arose,
That heroë for numbers and for prose,

That throughly paced our language as to show
The plenteous English hand in hand might go
With Greek and Latin, and did first reduce
Our tongue from Lilly's writing then in use."

But even the affectations of Lilly were not without their use as helps to refinement. If, like Chaucer's frere,