writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets, of whom in a criticism on the works of Cowley it is not improper to give some account. This kind of writing, which was, I believe, borrowed from Marino and his followers, had been recommended by the example of Donne, a man of very extensive and various knowledge; and by Jonson, whose manner resembled that of Donne more in the ruggedness of his lines than in the cast of his sentiments." Johnson, therefore, supposes "witty" writing to have been due to the example of Marino, although Donne wrote before Marino had acquired his great reputation; and he represents it as springing up almost capriciously in England about the beginning of the seventeenth century, although writing precisely similar in character prevailed at the same period, and earlier, in every country of Europe that could boast of a literature. How is it, if Johnson is right, that within the century between 1550 and 1650 we find Lyly writing in England: "There dwelt in Athens a young gentleman of great possessions and of so comely a personage that it was doubted whether he was more bound to Nature for the lineaments of his person, or to Fortune for the increase of his possessions. But Nature, impatient of comparisons, and as it were, disdaining a companion or co-partner in her working, added to this comely nesse of body such a sharpe capacity of mind, that not only she proved Fortune counterfait, but was half of that opinion that she herselfe was only currant Marino writing in Italy: "But who can paint the two shining and serene stars beneath either brow? Who the beautiful scarlet of his sweet lips, which of living treasures are rich and full? Or what whiteness of ivory, or what of the lily can match his neck, which, like an adamant column, upholds and sustains a heaven of wonders gathered in that fair countenance?" Manuel de Faria y Sousa writing in Spain: "Ten lucid arrows of crystal were darted at me from the eyes of Albania, which produced on my pain an effect like ruby, though the cause was crystalline?" Lyly's 'Euphues.' Marino, Adone,' Canto i., 44. 'Fuente de Aganippe,' o Rimas Varias de Manuel de Faria y Sousa. lastly Mdlle. de Scudéri writing in France: "You doubtless remember well, malam, that Herminius had begged Clelia to teach him how to go from New Friendship to Tenderness: so that he had to begin with this first town which is at the foot of the Map in order to go to the others; for to make you understand better Clelia's design, you will see she has imagined that Tenderness may proceed from three different causes; either from great esteem, or gratitude, or inclination; and hence she was obliged to place those towns of Tenderness on three rivers which bear those names, and to make also three different roads to go to them. Just as one says, Cumæ on the Ionian sea, and Cum on the Tyrrhenian sea, so she makes us say, Tenderness on Inclination, Tenderness on Esteein, and Tenderness on Gratitude." And again, how is it that all these specimens of false 'wit' are to be found within an epoch which may be roughly limited on the one side by the Council of Trent, marking the ebb of Scholasticism, on the other by the abolition of military tenures in England, indicating the disappearance of the Feudal System? Evidently the resemblance between writers dealing with such different subjects, and in so many languages, is not to be explained as if it were the result, as Johnson supposes, of mere accident: it must be the result of the operation of similar forces, religious, social, and political, and of the influence of some wide-spread literary tradition. It will be observed that the leading feature in all the examples of witty' writing cited above is the excessive use of metaphor. Addison goes so far as to maintain that mannerism of this kind is in Greek literature practised only by the epigrammatists. In truth, however, the desire for novelty, and the necessities of poetical diction, made the use of out-of-theway metaphors by no means infrequent among the Greek tragedians, and it is difficult to see how such expressions as 1 'Clelic,' part i., book i. Hallam (Literary History,' vol. iii. p. 255), who sees the inadequacy of Johnson's historical explanation, yet adopts his opinion that "witty ' writing arose simply out of the desire for novelty. The desire of the poets to be regarded as inventors was doubtless one of the causes of the style, but in itself this mere desire does not explain why, in the midst of so much diversity, there should have been sa much similarity of aim. 36 'Spectator,' No. 62. "the sharp-beaked unbarking hounds of Zeus" (meaning griffins),'"an arrow-point not forged with fire" (meaning the gad-fly)," an Ares without brazen shield " (used of a plague),' or "a fire not of Hephaestus" (the thing referred to being discord), differ from the 'mixed wit' spoken of in the 'Spectator. These ingenious and enigmatical expressions were, as we know, within certain limits approved by the best critics of the Greeks. Still there can be no doubt that while in the best classical poets metaphor is used deliberately as an ornament of expression,' among the poets of the middle ages it almost always involves a refinement of thought; and while the employment of metaphor for its own sake appears in Greek literature only at the last stage, when the greater poetical motives were exhausted, the same characteristic presents itself at the very dawn of modern European poetry, when all the streams of imagination were beginning to spring from new sources. The explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is to be sought in the ideas of Nature prevailing when the art of poetry began to revive after the fall of the Roman Empire. The Greek poets and orators were but little distracted by philosophic speculation; their modes of expression were imitated directly from nature and their own social institutions ;. the Greek and Latin critics drew the rules of rhetoric and poetry from their observation of the practice of the orators and poetsBut the imagination of those who first began to harmonise the existing languages of Europe was pressed on all sides by the ideas of established philosophies and elder civilisations. Their physical ideas of the universe were drawn from the geography and astronomy of Ptolemy. Their taste, entirely strange to Eschylus, Prometheus,' 803. * Ibid., 880. Sophocles, 'O. T.,' 190. Cicero explains the use of metaphor somewhat differently from Aristotle: Tertius ille modus transferendi verbi late patet, quem necessitas genuit inopia coacta et angustiis; post autem delectatio jucunditasque celebravit; nam ut vestis frigoris. depellendi causâ reperta primo post adhiberi cæpta est ad ornatum etiam corporis et dignitatem, sic verbi translatio instituta est ab inopiæ causâ frequentata delectationis."-De Oratore, lib. iii, cap. 38. the traditions of Greece and Rome, had been mainly affected by models, which, derived from the Arabs in Spain or imported from the East by the Crusaders, lent themselves readily to the chivalrous fancics engendered by the Feudal System. Above all it must be remembered that the early poets of Europe were surrounded by the atmosphere of the Scholastic Logic. To the subtle and all-pervading influence of this philosophy we owe it that poets, writing with a complete freshness of style, in a newly-formed language, and in a state of society in many respects extremely primitive, yet exhibit in their work all those artifices, distinctions, and refinements, which we are accustomed to associate with a literature in its decay. Nowhere is the scholastic spirit more faithfully or vividly reflected than in the 'Tensons' of the Troubadours, and in the casuistry of the Courts of Love. Describing the Tenson, M. Raynouard says: "Dans les usages galants de la chevalerie, dans les jeux spirituels des troubadours, on distinguait le talent de soutenir et de défendre des questions délicates et controversées, ordinairement relatives à l'amour ; l'ouvrage où les poëtes exerçaient ainsi la finesse et la subtilité de leur esprit, s'appelait Tenson du latin Contensionem, Dispute, Débat; on lit dans le Comte de Poitiers: Et si vous me proposez un jeu d'amour, je ne suis pas assez sot que de ne pas choisir la meilleure question.” 1 Another fertile source of metaphysical thought and metaphorical expression was Allegory. Neo-Platonism, permeating Christian theology, and blending readily with the figurative language of the Bible, taught the learned world to interpret Nature after the fashion described by Boccaccio in the passage already cited, and allegory in consequence acquired an established place in poetical literature. The Platonic philosophy of Ideas was easily conformable to modes of thought resting on a semimaterial conception of the world beyond the grave; hence it is that the Vision is so favourite a form with the poets of the thir. teenth and fourteenth centuries, who followed on the path struck out by Plato in his Myths, as in the 'Divine Comedy' of Dante, the 'Romaunt of the Rose,' and the 'Vision of Piers Plowman;' ' Raynouard's 'Choix des Troubadours,' vol. ii., p. lxxxiv. and hence too the numerous abstractions, False Semblance, Faise Danger, Love, Simplesse, Fraunchise, and the like, which crowd the verse of the period. Lastly, the use of metaphors and conceits in early European poetry was largely encouraged by the almost exclusive application of these Oriental, Scholastic, Allegorical ideas of Nature to the subject of Love. The necessity of a crowd of competing poets, to exhibit a common theme in novel lights, kept the imagination perpetually on the alert to discover resemblances between the objects of external nature and the spiritual objects which appeared to transcend it. Hence that frequent personification of abstractions which is of course a leading feature in the most beautiful and pathetic specimen of this kind of writing, the 'Vita Nuova' of Dante.' Already, also, in the early remains of Provençal poetry, we find that the heart has become a castle, while the eyes of ladies are the enemies of the hearts of men, and inflict upon them delightful wounds and pleasurable pains.' At the meridian of the Scholastic Philosophy and of the Feudal System the forms of poetry produced under them no 1 The very curious and interesting passage, in which, in the 'Vita Nuova,' Dante defends himself for personi fying Love by reference to the prac tice of the Latin and Greek poets, exactly illustrates what is said above, and shows how completely the philosophical criticism of Aristotle and Quintilian had disappeared from the medieval world. "The first," says he, "who began to write as a poet in the vulgar tongue was moved thereto by wishing to make his words understood by a lady who could not easily understand Latin verse. this practice makes against those who take any other subject than that of Love, inasmuch as this mode of writing was used from the first only in speaking of Love. Whence, sceing that greater licence of speaking is granted to pocts than to prose. And writers, and these writers in rhyme are nothing else than poets in the vulgar tongue, it is just and reasonable that they should have greater licence of speech than others that use that tongue; so that if any figure or rhetorical colouring be allowed to the poets, it should also be allowed to the rhymers. If, then, we sce that the poets have spoken of inanimate things as if they had sense, and have made them hold discourse together, and that not only about real things but things not real (for instance, where they make things speak which have no existence, and many things which are accidents speak as if they were substances or men), it is just that the writer of rhymes should be allowed to do the like." 2 Instances of such conceits are to |