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 towards the sun's rising. It has seemed to me that life was running more and more into prose. Even our books for children have been growing more and more practical and realistic. The fairies are no longer permitted to print their rings on the tender sward of the child's fancy, and yet it is the child's fancy that sometimes lives obscurely on to minister unexpected solace to the lonelier and less sociable mind of the man. Our nature resents this, and seeks refuge in the holes and corners where coarser excitements may be had at dearer rates. I sometimes find myself thinking that if this hardening process should go much farther, it is before us, and not behind, that we should look for the Age of Flint.

II

MARLOWE

I 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 "Faerie Queene 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 for 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,

"Somewhat he lisped, for his wantonness," it was through the desire

"To make his English sweet upon his tongue."

It was the general clownishness against which he revolted, and we owe him our thanks for it. To show of what brutalities even recent writers could be capable, it will suffice to mention that Golding, in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, makes a witch mutter the devil's pater-noster, and Ulysses express his fears of going "to pot." I should like

to read you a familiar sonnet of Sidney's for its

sweetness:

"Come, Sleep: O Sleep! the certain knot of peace,

The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man's wealth, the prisoner's release,

The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof, shield me from out the press
Of those fierce darts despair at me doth throw;
O make in me those civil wars to cease:
I will good tribute pay if thou do so.
Take thou of me smooth pillows, sweetest bed,
A chamber deaf to noise and blind to light,
A rosy garland, and a weary head:

And if these things, as being thine of right,
Move not thy heavy grace, thou shalt in me,
Livelier than elsewhere, Stella's image see."

Here is ease and simplicity; but in such a phrase as "baiting-place of wit" there is also a want of that perfect discretion which we demand of the language of poetry, however we may be glad to miss it in the thought or emotion which that language conveys. Baiting-place is no more a homespun word than the word inn, which adds a charm to one of the sweetest verses that Spenser ever wrote; but baiting-place is common, it smacks of the hostler and postilion, and commonness is a very poor relation indeed of simplicity. But doubtless one main cause of the vivacity of phrase which so charms us in our earlier writers is to be found in the fact that there were not yet two languages — that of life and that of literature. The divorce between the two took place a century and a half later, and that process of breeding in and in began which at last reduced the language of verse to a kind of idiocy.