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works of Infinite Wisdom, and so piously resolved to make all his study of them the source of religious contemplations, both philosophic and sublime.'

But the partial tribute of a mere local memorial cannot discharge this long-neglected debt of the English people. England cannot do justice to herself except by rearing, in the Metropolis itself, a great and glorious monument, such as shall adequately express in the face of the world that the veneration in which the memory of Newton is held is no factitious sentiment, but a deep-seated national conviction.

ART. V.-Bell's Annotated Series of British Poets.* London, 29 Vols.

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ORD MACAULAY'S maturer literary judgments are well entitled to attention; but English poetry amply refutes the dictum of his youth, that Poets, in the full force of the word, belong to the earliest stage in the development of a nation. Even as regards Epic Poems, properly so called, we doubt whether it be true; and certainly, if we look to poetry, descriptive, lyrical, narrative, or didactic, the present century gives proof that this art, in Wordsworth's fine phrase, is the first and best of all knowledge-it is immortal as the heart of man.'

Yet although it may be confidently anticipated that no possible advance or probable change in the circumstances of our race will be fatal to the growth of this immortal amaranth,' there is no lover of poetry but will have been struck by the long and seemingly unaccountable intervals during which the vision has been withheld and the faculty powerless. There are nations, rich in the materials for poetry, that have waited during whole centuries, for the one true singer who should awake them from silence, by speaking to them a language which they at once have recognized as their own. Such was Italy when, after the attainment of no inconsiderable civilization, and after the prelusive strains of writers unable to make any definite step beyond their Provençal models, Dante gave in the Commedia' a masterpiece, of which his early poems afforded no anticipation-at once, as Hallam observes, dispelling the fear that the Muses had withdrawn their gifts from modern Europe, and creating the poetry of the fair land where Si is in use." Such was Germany when, the first age of legend and love-song concluded, four hundred years went by before a nation gifted with

* The series, which is to extend to 50 volumes, is not yet completed.
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the best poetical elements found its voice in Goethe and his fellow-poets. And such was our own country, when the 'noble and puissant nation, rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks,' though latest in the race at starting, at one step went far beyond all her contemporaries, nor stayed her advance until she rivalled the glories of Periclean Athens. It is on some aspects of this subject, mainly lying in the first of the two great divisions of English poetry (from Chaucer to Milton), that we wish at present to comment. For we think that there are but two essential cycles; and that with the writers after 1660 begins what, although marked by very diverse phases, may be truly defined as the modern style.

Most readers will be aware of the reasons which made it natural that English poetry, after its splendid annunciation in the 'Canterbury Tales,' should languish during the century and half that intervened before its reappearance in the 'Faery Queen.' Nor is any deep historical reading needful to account in general terms for the approach to excellence made by Chaucer and by Spenser, or for the triumphant progress whose first stage was consummated in Paradise Lost.' We see at once that the years of barrenness were years of foreign and of civil warfare, ending in momentous political and religious convulsions, and that this period was preceded and was followed by the two long and brilliant reigns of Edward III. and Elizabeth. Many, perhaps most of the ages in which the higher forms of poetry have flourished resemble these reigns in the main features of national confidence and energy, arising from success abroad, and a rich and peaceful development of the resources of the country. The early epics of Greece, Germany, and the far North may indeed have been slowly evolved during the more tranquil and fortunate moments of many stormy centuries; but the features which we have enumerated are common, more or less, to the days of the first Ionic and Æolian minstrelsy; to those of the poets of Athens, Alexandria, and Rome; to the territories in which Dante and Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso, spent their youth or their later years; to the Spain of Calderon, and the Germany of the poets between Wieland and Heine. Allowance made for the strange unlikeness of Oriental and Western civilization, the remark may, we believe, be extended to the age of Kalidas in India, of Firdusi and of Hafiz in Persia; of those writers, lastly, whose language, unfamiliar to European ears, is said by competent judges to conceal treasures of song almost worthy of the Paradise which tradition once placed within Arabia the Happy.

Whilst, however, a similarity exists between these poetical periods, a difference may be noted, dividing them in a certain

degree

degree into classes which we might call Creative and Retrospective. Human nature and human history never indeed really present broad lines of distinction: one age is always intertwined with the past, and prophetic of the coming; the old ever blended in the new, and the new anticipated in the old. But there have been creative ages, producing poets like Sophocles or Shakespeare; and ages like those to which Virgil and Horace, Tasso and Calderon belonged: when poets looked back with regret to the brilliant time that had preceded them, and to models from which they were unwilling to depart.

Applying these remarks to England, we think that Chaucer, rightly termed often the Morning Star of our poetical literature, towards his own age stood in an inverse relation. Before his own death in 1400, he had seen the succession to the Crown, so splendid and so secure at the era of Poitiers, first shaken by the premature death of the Prince, then destroyed by his son's incapacity; he had seen what he must have considered the virtual close of English sovereignty in western France; he had seen the first outbreak of that spirit of religious change which was hardly to sleep again until the gentle Prioress, who,

'Full well sang the service divine Entuned in hire nose full sweetely,'

-with monk and pardoner, and the whole 'rule of Seint Maure and of Seint Beneit,' were to become a tale that is told, and alive only in the brilliant colours of his immortal narrative. The reign of his great patron Edward III. was in fact the turningpoint of the middle ages in England; the half-artificial splendours of chivalry which emblazon it, and are reflected in the pages of his ambassador, stand in strange contrast, we know not whether more pathetic or more pitiful, with the stern questions raised, within a few months of the dreary death of the King in deserted Eltham, by the claims of Religion and of Labour-claims now first heard of together within the country which they have never since ceased to stir. That the poet shared in some portion of these new interests we know from the tradition which connects him with the Wickliffite tendencies of John of Gaunt. But his poetry embodies almost exclusively the spirit of his own younger days. The Anglo-French dialect of Chaucer, interspersed with Latinisms, which, like Milton, he failed to naturalize, was not aptly described as a 'well of English undefiled.' It is rather such chivalric English as Froissart might have employed, and within a century it was obsolete. Except in the rare passages of humour and of vivid description, which in style belong to no special age, the substance of his bulky volume refers as closely

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to the medieval times, as Homer's to the heroic. Chaucer's longest production is his translation of the once-famous Roman de la Rose' that singular summary of the licensed and unlicensed feelings and speculations current in feudal Europe, far more spoken of than known, and which, if known, would surprise many who have praised it. He seems to have been wanting in a certain lightness of touch, conciseness, and melody; and hence the lyrical manner of the Troubadours and of the early poets of Italy and Swabia is unrepresented in his collection. But, this excepted, he has given admirable specimens of every form of poetical literature then practised; closing in his old age with that magnificent Prologue to the Pilgrimage which gives intimations of a vast advance in nature and invention. Blake, the painter,* finely said of this poem, 'As Linnæus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the classes of men.' But, amongst the crowd of characters presented, the heart of the noble poet was clearly not with monk or merchant, priest or ploughman, but with the very parfit gentle knight,'

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That fro the time that he first began

To riden out, loved chevalrie,

Trouthe and honour, freedom and curtesie.'

His poems neither were, nor could be, precursors or models in any strict sense for the poets of modern England. Chaucer is the Hesperus of what, in absence of a better term, we must call our Feudal Ages.

The world was changed when poetry reappeared amongst us. A revolution had passed over Europe, almost as striking as that revolution which substituted the rule of the Teutonic races for the Roman. And at that earlier period, in no country was the contrast between old and new so abrupt as in our own. England under Edward III., all things considered, stood highest in arts, arms, and letters in European Christendom. But England under Henry VIII. was, at the moment, below France, Italy, and Germany in literature; and below France, Germany, and Spain in power. For the last time, the far west had to look eastward for the renewal of its civilization. In poetry, as in architecture, what men at first borrowed thus was rather form than substance; and the forms naturally selected in each case were taken from Italy-the only country which, in 1500, supplied living examples of both.. The Earl of Surrey-a man of fine genius, though the state of

* We are glad to learn that Messrs. Macmillan are about to publish an Illustrated Life of this great artist, which has been for some time in preparation under the careful and competent editorship of Mr. A. Gilchrist.

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our language and literature prevented him from becoming a great poet-like those early travellers who carried home from Athens imperfect drawings from the masterworks of Phidias and Ictinus, brought before his countrymen some resemblance of the grace of Petrarch, some fragments from the art of Virgil and of Horace. Here is a specimen of his art.

'The soote* season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill, and eke the vale,
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her maket hath told her tale.

Summer is come, for every spray now springs,
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;
The fishes fleet with new repaired scale

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The adder all her slough away she flings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale;‡
The busy bee her honey now she mings ;§
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.

And thus I see among these pleasant things

Each care decays,--and yet my sorrow springs.'

We have quoted this perhaps familiar sonnet (exceptional to Surrey's general manner in its naturalism), to point out that, whilst imitative on the whole of Petrarch's 'Zefiro torna,' in the attempt at a closer painting from nature it connects Surrey with our earlier poets, and foreshadows a style which has been since eminently characteristic of English poetry. How rapidly this style was taken up may be seen in a poem published a few years after Surrey's death, and (although we are convinced without foundation) sometimes ascribed to him.

'The restless state of the Lover when absent from the Mistress of his heart. • The sun, when he hath spread his rays, And show'd his face ten thousand ways, Ten thousand things do then begin To show the life that they are in. The heaven shows lively art and hue Of sundry shapes and colours new, And laughs upon the earth; anon The earth, as cold as any stone, Wet in the tears of her own kind, 'Gins then to take a joyful mind. For well she feels that out and out The sun doth warm her right about, And dries her children tenderly, And shows them forth full orderly. The mountains high, and how they stand! The valleys, and the great main land!

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The trees, the herbs, the towers strong,
The castles, and the rivers long!
The hunter then sounds out his horn,
And rangeth straight through wood and corn.
On hills then show the ewe and lamb,
And every young one with his dam.
Then lovers walk and tell their tale
Both of their bliss and of their bale,
And how they serve, and how they do,
And how their lady loves them too.
Then tune the birds their harmony,
Then flock the fowls in company,
Then everything doth pleasure find
In that, that comforts all their kind.
No dreams do drench them of the night
Of foes, that would them slay or bite,

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