Its history.

were in manner larger lyrics—lyrical "magnums." As for patterns, not merely Pindar himself and the Greek choruses (troublesome strophic arrangement being prudently dropped), but the Italian canzone, Spenser's own two great odes, and other things presented themselves. Nor, in fact, to any one of very moderate versifying faculty were special patterns in the least necessary. The general rhythm of English prosody having been by this time sufficiently established, only individual incapacity could go far wrong. A fifteenth-century Pindaric is a thing too awful to think of; though, in fact, not a few fifteenthcentury rhyme-royal stanzas are like small Pindaric strophes written by a bad poet and stupid man. But there was no such danger in the seventeenth, except that the individual stupidity would, of course, have its way in this form or that.

That Cowley says nothing of all this (or practically nothing) in his actual Preface to his Pindaric Odes will surprise no sensible reader. From his words you might think that he began by translating two actual Odes of Pindar into something more or less resembling their original form in English, and then was tempted to extend the practice to original composition. Very likely this was the actual conscious historical genesis of the matter in his case. But the order of conscious thought and the order of actual evolution are pretty notoriously not identical; and, as I must again and again remind readers, there is perhaps no case in which they need have coincided less than in prosody. It is sufficient that Cowley did adopt these irregular semi-lyrical stanzas or paragraphs; that they almost immediately "made a school"; that they produced, during the last half of the seventeenth century and much of the eighteenth, some of the very worst verse (poetically, not always prosodically) to be found in the English language; but that, though again and again corrected into Greek form by poets who were also scholars, they have practically maintained themselves to the present day, and have shown themselves quite as able to provide a poet with wings to soar as they are to

provide a poetaster with weights to sink. In fact, interesting as some of the regularly strophic arrangements1 are, it may be doubted whether English is not of the "rebel sex" in poetry, and does not take such things rather impatiently. At any rate, it is a very significant fact that Milton, a scholar if ever there was one, the possessor of an ear the infallibility of which was only limited by his nonconformist temper and his unconquerable tendency to experiment, a craftsman able to do almost anything he liked with "numbers," did not adopt strict correspondence of form in Lycidas, or even in Samson Agonistes.

As for Cowley himself, it is of course very easy to Cowley's own practice. show that his Odes are "not" several things; and most particularly that they are not Pindaric or choric, being usually an uncertain number of irregular stanzas, corresponding to one another neither in number nor in position of line, and arranged on no system of rhyme-tally. But this, apart from the question of mere nomenclature (and even perhaps, to some extent, in respect of that), is a merely technical, not to say a merely pedantic, objection. Take them for what they are, not for what they are not, and it is impossible to deny them great capabilities, which, in their very form, Dryden was to develop admirably in the "Mrs. Anne Killigrew" especially, and which, whether as regulated by Gray and Collins or remodelled afresh by the poets of the nineteenth century, were to add vastly to the stores of English poetry. Here, as elsewhere, Cowley wants the anecdotic "that-!" As in the Davideis, he accumulates and agglomerates fine things, and things not fine at all-harmonies and cacophonies, curiosities and mere oddities, in the most pell-mell fashion. As in the Lyrics-and this is specially important and unfortunate-his irregular schematisation is merely hit or miss, it may come off" or not come off, almost at the hazard of the dice. of its author's own words.

Yet it makes one think of some

It is a "large garden" to the

1 They date, the reader may be reminded, back to Ben Jonson at least, and were attempted by Cowley. Congreve's essays in them are in front

of us.

The decay of

stanza.

"small house" of the couplet, and it afforded an invaluable place of escape, and exercise, and contemplation of nature to those whom the couplet cramped and confined.

We may conclude the chapter with a few further The quatrain. words on the curious phenomenon which was noticed above, which will be found glanced at in the only prosodic document of the period, and which is one of its most important historically-the growth of discontent with stanza. Of course, there are plenty of long poems of the time which use this-Kynaston's Leoline and Sydanis, More's and Joseph Beaumont's great philosophical treatises, numerous others. Nor is there much return, if any, to the disorder of the fifteenth-century rhymeroyal-a disorder which is practically reproducing itself in blank verse. The mere stanza forms, now that some general sense of rhythm was diffused, were sufficient to prevent that. But the longing for the "geminell," which discloses itself in those curious observations of Drayton's long before, almost inevitably brings distaste of the symphonic forms with it. If they end in a couplet, why not have the couplet alone? If they do not, why don't they? That seems to have been the unspoken drift of the thought of the time, indicating itself even in such an apparently contradictory symptom as the Pindaric: indicating itself directly in the contraction of the stave to a mere quatrain in the first place, as a preliminary to reduction to the lowest term short of blank verse. The principal example of this, Davenant's Gondibert, belongs in time to the present Book and chapter, but the discussion of the measure had best take place when we come to its greatest practitioner, Dryden. Davenant, whose curious reasons for choosing it are noted elsewhere, manages it with fair skill, but certainly does not evade or conquer its defects.

The chief of these is the peculiarly soporific effectan effect, as we shall see, not fully evaded or conquered by Dryden himself of the form when repeated uniformly or at great length. Gondibert might have been a prose heroic romance of some interest; as a verse one

(putting poetry out of the question) it is almost more difficult to read than its contemporary and rival Pharonnida, though Davenant tells his story clearly enough, and Chamberlayne with an almost total absence of clarity.'

1 The experiments in new short stanzas, such as the excessively awkward 10, 8, 12 of Benlowes' Theophila, point the moral.

the compartment.

Jonson a defaulter.

CHAPTER V

PROSODISTS

Barrenness of the compartment-Jonson a defaulter-Joshua Poole

or "J. D."

Barrenness of THIS chapter will probably be the shortest of the volume, except the corresponding one in the next Book, yet it is not, nor is that, introduced merely for the sake of symmetry. That after the very considerable interest taken in many if not all questions relating to poetry during the Elizabethan period proper, there should be, during a period so closely united with it in poetical practice, an almost total disuse of poetic theorising, may seem odd. But there is no doubt that, as a matter of fact, the first half of the seventeenth century with us is exceptionally barren in all kinds of critical exercise, and most barren in prosody. Jonson, the principal exception in criticism generally, had intended to be an exception here also. At the beginning of his unfinished English Grammar he not only, as he was by tradition almost bound to do, glances at prosody, and makes a distinction between English and the classical languages in point of quantity, but promises something of a discussion "in the heel of the book." That heel, however, played him or us a worse trick than did the heel of Achilles; for it never, so far as we know, came into being at all. One naturally regrets this; for a prosodic treatise from the man who not merely was a great master of the practice, but who thought Fraunce a fool for writing in quantity, and Donne worthy of hanging for not keeping accent, ought to have