doubt reflected the prevalent idea of Nature. Assume, for example, an idea of the universe derived from the Ptolemaic system, the inner significance of numbers, the symbolical interpretation of colours, the influence of the heavenly bodies on earthly things, and the language of the 'Vita Nuova' will appear not merely mystical, but in a high degree natural and pathetic. Few who read the narrative will doubt Dante's real love for Beatrice, though his love, like all other earthly things, had for him a spiritual meaning, and he himself makes Beatrice say : "Così parlar conviensi al vostro ingegno, Perocchè solo da sensato apprende Ciò che fa poscia d'intelletto degno." But this sincere conviction soon decayed. Even in a poet so immediately connected with the Troubadours as Petrarch, we see the natural tendency of the new poetical taste to gravitate towards artificiality and false wit. The following sonnet, describing the soul mastered by sensual appetite, which seems to have been famous as late as the age of Tasso,' foreshadows, in its mechanical metaphor, the final decadence of the style in the hands of Cowley : "Passa la nave mia colma d'obblio Per aspro mar a mezza notte il verno A ciascun remo un pensier pronto e rio Che la tempesta e 'l fin par ch' abbi a scherno: La vela rompe un vento umido eterno Di sospir, di speranze, e di desio : Pioggia di lagrimar, nebbia di sdegni Morta fra l'onde è la ragion e l'arte. By the middle of the sixteenth century the disease of the imagination, the germs of which are here visible, had fully developed itself: by the middle of the seventeenth imagination itself had sunk under its ravages. It is a long step downwards from Laura to the Fair Geraldine, but still more tremendous is the descent from Surrey's mistress to 'The Mistress' of Cowley, whom, in spite of the hundred poems addressed to her, the poet does not hesitate to confess to be a purely mythical being. "So it is," he says, "that poets are scarce thought Freemen of the Company without paying some duties, and obliging themselves to be true to Love!" What would Guido Cavalcanti have said to his late descendant? The history of the decline and fall of Allegory is equally significant. In the thirteenth century this manner of writing is so common that interpretation of it is not thought necessary. But by the middle of the sixteenth century writers of long narrative poems are generally found to be anxious to explain their inner meaning: they therefore necessarily deceive their readers, and perhaps themselves. Thus, in place of the enigmatic, but in its own way simple and natural, opening of the Divine Comedy,' we find Tasso confessing in a letter to a friend that, when he formed the design of his 'Jerusalem Delivered,' he had no thought of Allegory, but that nevertheless the poem may be interpreted in an esoteric sense.' Marino has the impudence to pretend that the 'Adone,' the most luxurious and effeminate of poems, has a moral design. In England a long succession of insipid allegorical poems culminated in night in winter between Scylla and Charybdis, and at the helm sits my Lord, or, rather, my enemy. At each oar is a thought prompt and evil, which appears to laugh to scorn the tempest and the end. A damp, incessant wind of sighs, of hopes, and of desire rends the sail; rain of tears, cloud of wrath, drenches and slackens the now weary shrouds, which are tangled with error and ignorance : hidden are my two sweet customary stars perished in the waves is art and reason. So that I begin to despair of the port.'-Petrarch, Sonnet 156. 1 See his letter to Scipio Gonzaga, dated June 15, 1575. 2 Ombraggia il ver Parnaso e non rivela Gli atti misteri ai semplici profani, the beautiful conception of the 'Faery Queen;' but even here the unreality of the poet's inward belief betrays itself in Spenser's preface, where, after explaining that his poem is modelled after Ariosto's Orlando,' the hero of which he thinks to be intended as 'the model of a good governor and a virtuous man,' he goes on to announce that the great and mighty Gloriana is meant to typify Queen Elizabeth! Here, then, we have the key alike to the growth and the decomposition of the medieval style of poetry. The growth is due to a profound and sincere mode of religious belief, and to a prevailing system of manners, from both of which the early poets drew their idea of Nature and the imaginative forms in which they expressed it. The decomposition is due to the adherence of the later poets to the forms thus created, long after the decay of the mode of religious belief, and the transformation of social manners, had deprived them of their old verisimilitude. A multitude of metaphors, conceits, and fantastic refinements, were left high and dry by the ebb of the scholastic philosophy, and these the poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries caught at, and employed them for their own sake. Thus, says Marino, "I have printed certain of my sacred discourses which have been received with considerable applause, not so much on account of their erudition and the purity of their style as of their novelty in point of invention, each of them being always made to turn on a single metaphor." No other result was to be expected from such sonnets as the one by Petrarch I have already cited. Moreover, by a perfectly intelligible process, as these late poets were moved not by an inward conviction of the imagination, but by the mere desire to say something novel and sur prising, so, in proportion to the inanity of their subject-matter, is found to be the violence of their metaphors. In England, to take one example out of a thousand, Cartwright, a Royalist poet, selects for a subject King Charles I.'s recovery from smallpox in 1633, and finds his Majesty's disease to be of a celestial nature: "Let then the name be altered, let us say To show the ill, not make it; and to tell By their pale looks the bearer was not well." This, perhaps, may be paralleled by Dryden's juvenile lines, written still later in the century, on the death of Lord Hastings, in which he compares the marks of small-pox to jewels and rose-buds! There was yet another cause for the corruption of taste in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the same time that the departing spirit of medievalism left behind it a vast inheritance of forms which had ceased to have any real significance, the reviving spirit of classicalism brought along with it a store of images belonging to the religion of the extinct Pagan world, the meaning of which was but ill comprehended by modern society. The two streams joined; hence that strange compound of Christian dogma and Pagan mythology which prevails in the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline poets, and of which, perhaps, the most remarkable examples are to be found in the Faery Queen.' These considerations may serve to elucidate what is not immediately obvious to the modern reader, the relation between the words 'Wit' and 'Nature,' which Pope couples in his famous definition: "True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed." ' Chalmers' 'English Poets,' vol. vi., p. 515-Poeins of William Cartwright. He duly enumerates in his Essay the various 'idols' of taste in poetical thought and diction, which had sprung out of the decay of medievalism and the revival of paganism : "Some to conceit alone their taste confine, And glittering thoughts struck out at every line." This was the aim of the school of Donne and Cowley in England; of the Marinists in Italy; and of the Conceptualists in Spain: "Others for language all their care express, And value books, as women men, for dress." Such were the Pleiad in France; the Euphuists of England: and the Spanish disciples of Gongora, the inventor of the estilo culto: "But most by numbers judge a poet's song, And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong." He seems in this division of the Essay' to be referring to those Court poets so numerous in the seventeenth century'the mob of gentlemen who write with ease '-who gave all their attention to the music of poetry without regarding its sense and subject-matter. Waller himself, in his verses to Sacharissa and similar poems, would have fallen under Pope's censure, who noted the difference between his smoothness' and the varying verse and full resounding line' which Dryden, the first real master of his own school, introduced into English poetry. Elsewhere, too, he has exemplified the taste of his tuneful fools,' as he calls them, in his 'Song by a Person of Quality.' All these false conceptions of art spring, he says, out of false conceptions of nature: "Thus critics of less judgment than caprice, As most in manners, by a love to parts." What he himself insists on in his Essay is the necessity of |