Volume I Am Striving to Give a History As Little Inadequate As Possible.

They had in the air around them an English purged of archaisms and uncouthnesses, fully adapted to every literary purpose, and yet still racy of the soil, and free from that burden of hackneyed and outworn literary platitudes and commonplaces with which centuries of voluminous literary production have vitiated and loaded the English of our own day. They were not afraid of Latinising, but they had an ample stock of the pure vernacular to draw on. These things may be classed together. On the other side, but equally healthful, may be put the fact that the style and structure of the originals and earlier versions, and especially that verse division which has been now so unwisely abandoned, served as safeguards against the besetting sin of all prose writers of their time, the habit of indulging in long wandering sentences, in paragraphs destitute of proportion and of grace, destitute even of ordinary manageableness and shape. The verses saved them from that once for all; while on the other hand their own taste, and the help given by the structure of the original in some cases, prevented them from losing sight of the wood for the trees, and omitting to consider the relation of verse to verse, as well as the antiphony of the clauses within the verse. Men without literary faculty might no doubt have gone wrong; but these were men of great literary faculty, whose chief liabilities to error were guarded against precisely by the very conditions in which they found their work. The hour had come exactly, and so for once had the men.

The result of their labours is so universally known that it is not necessary to say very much about it; but the mere fact of the universal knowledge carries with it a possibility of under-valuation. In another place, dealing with the general subject of English prose style, I have selected the sixth and seventh verses of the eighth chapter of Solomon's Song as the best example known to me of absolutely perfect English prose--harmonious, modulated, yet in no sense trespassing the limits of prose and becoming poetry. I have in the same place selected, as a companion passage from a very different original, the Charity passage of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, which has been so miserably and wantonly mangled and spoilt by the bad taste and ignorance of the late revisers. I am tempted to dwell on this because it is very germane to our subject. One of the blunders which spoils this passage in the Revised Version is the pedantic substitution of "mirror" for "glass," it having apparently occurred to some wiseacre that glass was not known to the ancients, or at least used for mirrors. Had this wiseacre had the slightest knowledge of English literature, a single title of Gascoigne's, "The Steel Glass," would have dispensed him at once from any attempt at emendation; but this is ever and always the way of the sciolist. Fortunately such a national possession as the original Authorised Version, when once multiplied and dispersed by the press, is out of reach of vandalism. The improved version, constructed on very much the same principle as Davenant's or Ravenscroft's improvements on Shakespere, may be ordered to be read in churches, and substituted for purposes of taking oaths. But the original (as it may be called in no burlesque sense such as that of a famous story) will always be the text resorted to by scholars and men of letters for purposes of reading, and will remain the authentic lexicon, the recognised source of English words and constructions of the best period. The days of creation; the narratives of Joseph and his brethren, of Ruth, of the final defeat of Ahab, of the discomfiture of the Assyrian host of Sennacherib; the moral discourses of Ecclesiastes and Ecclesiasticus and the Book of Wisdom; the poems of the Psalms and the prophets; the visions of the Revelation,--a hundred other passages which it is unnecessary to catalogue,--will always be the ne plus ultra of English composition in their several kinds, and the storehouse from which generation after generation of writers, sometimes actually hostile to religion and often indifferent to it, will draw the materials, and not unfrequently the actual form of their most impassioned and elaborate passages. Revision after revision, constructed in corrupt following of the transient and embarrassed phantoms of ephemeral fashion in scholarship, may sink into the Great Mother of Dead Dogs after setting right a tense here, and there transferring a rendering from text to margin or from margin to text. But the work of the unrevised version will remain unaffected by each of these futile exercitations. All the elements, all the circumstances of a translation as perfect as can be accomplished in any circumstances and with any elements, were then present, and the workers were worthy of the work. The plays of Shakespere and the English Bible are, and will ever be, the twin monuments not merely of their own period, but of the perfection of English, the complete expressions of the literary capacities of the language, at the time when it had lost none of its pristine vigour, and had put on enough but not too much of the adornments and the limitations of what may be called literary civilisation.

The boundary between the prose of this period and that which we shall treat later as "Caroline" is not very clearly fixed. Some men, such as Hall and Donne, whose poetical work runs parallel to that in prose which we are now noticing, come as prose writers rather under the later date; others who continued to write till long after Elizabeth's death, and even after that of James, seem, by their general complexion, to belong chiefly to the earlier day. The first of these is Ben Jonson, whose high reputation in other ways has somewhat unduly damaged, or at least obscured, his merits as a prose writer. His two chief works in this kind are his English Grammar, in which a sound knowledge of the rules of English writing is discovered, and the quaintly named Explorata or Discoveries and Timber--a collection of notes varying from a mere aphorism to a respectable essay. In these latter a singular power of writing prose appears. The book was not published till after Ben's death, and is thought to have been in part at least written during the last years of his life. But there can be no greater contrast than exists between the prose style usual at that time--a style tourmenté, choked with quotation, twisted in every direction by allusion and conceit, and marred by perpetual confusions of English with classical grammar--and the straightforward, vigorous English of these Discoveries. They come, in character as in time, midway between Hooker and Dryden, and they incline rather to the more than to the less modern form. Here is found the prose character of Shakespere which, if less magniloquent than that in verse, has a greater touch of sheer sincerity. Here, too, is an admirable short tractate on Style which exemplifies what it preaches; and a large number of other excellent things. Some, it is true, are set down in a shorthand fashion as if (which doubtless they were) they were commonplace-book notes for working up in due season. But others and perhaps the majority (they all Baconian-wise have Latin titles, though only one or two have the text in Latin) are written with complete attention to literary presentment; seldom though sometimes relapsing into loose construction of sentences and paragraphs, the besetting sin of the day, and often presenting, as in the following, a model of sententious but not dry form:--

"We should not protect our sloth with the patronage of difficulty. It is a false quarrel against nature that she helps understanding but in a few, when the most part of mankind are inclined by her thither, if they would take the pains; no less than birds to fly, horses to run, etc., which if they lose it is through their own sluggishness, and by that means become her prodigies, not her children. I confess nature in children is more patient of labour in study than in age; for the sense of the pain, the judgment of the labour is absent, they do not measure what they have done. And it is the thought and consideration that affects us more than the weariness itself. Plato was not content with the learning that Athens could give him, but sailed into Italy, for Pythagoras' knowledge: and yet not thinking himself sufficiently informed, went into Egypt, to the priests, and learned their mysteries. He laboured, so must we. Many things may be learned together and performed in one point of time; as musicians exercise their memory, their voice, their fingers, and sometimes their head and feet at once. And so a preacher, in the invention of matter, election of words, composition of gesture, look, pronunciation, motion, useth all these faculties at once: and if we can express this variety together, why should not divers studies, at divers hours, delight, when the variety is able alone to refresh and repair us? As when a man is weary of writing, to read; and then again of reading, to write. Wherein, howsoever we do many things, yet are we (in a sort) still fresh to what we begin; we are recreated with change as the stomach is with meats. But some will say, this variety breeds confusion, and makes that either we lose all or hold no more than the last. Why do we not then persuade husbandmen that they should not till land, help it with marle, lime, and compost? plant hop gardens, prune trees, look to beehives, rear sheep, and all other cattle at once? It is easier to do many things and continue, than to do one thing long."

No other single writer until we come to the pamphleteers deserves separate or substantive mention; but in many divisions of literature there were practitioners who, if they have not kept much notoriety as masters of style, were well thought of even in that respect in their day, and were long authorities in point of matter. The regular theological treatises of the time present nothing equal to Hooker, who in part overlapped it, though the Jesuit Parsons has some name for vigorous writing. In history, Knolles, the historian of the Turks, and Sandys, the Eastern traveller and sacred poet, bear the bell for style among their fellows, such as Hayward, Camden, Spelman, Speed, and Stow. Daniel the poet, a very good prose writer in his way, was also a historian of England, but his chief prose work was his Defence of Rhyme. He had companions in the critical task; but it is curious and by no means uninstructive to notice, that the immense creative production of the time seems to have to a great extent smothered the theoretic and critical tendency which, as yet not resulting in actual performance, betrayed itself at the beginning of the period in Webbe and Puttenham, in Harvey and Sidney. The example of Eden in collecting and Englishing travels and voyages was followed by several writers, of whom two, successively working and residing, the elder at Oxford, and the younger at Cambridge, made the two greatest collections of the kind in the language for interest of matter, if not for perfection of style. These were Richard Hakluyt and Samuel Purchas, a venerable pair. The perhaps overpraised, but still excellent Characters of the unfortunate Sir Thomas Overbury and the prose works, such as the Counterblast and Demonology, of James I., are books whose authors have made them more famous than their intrinsic merits warrant, and in the various collections of "works" of the day, older and newer, we shall find examples nearly as miscellaneous as those of the class of writers now to be noticed. Of all this miscellaneous work it is impossible to give examples, but one critical passage from Daniel, and one descriptive from Hakluyt may serve:--

"Methinks we should not so soon yield up our consents captive to the authority of antiquity, unless we saw more reason; all our understandings are not to be built by the square of Greece and Italy. We are the children of nature as well as they, we are not so placed out of the way of judgment but that the same sun of discretion shineth upon us; we have our portion of the same virtues, as well as of the same vices, et Catilinam quocunque in populo videas, quocunque sub axe. Time and the turn of things bring about these faculties according to the present estimation; and, res temporibus, non tempore rebus servire opportet. So that we must never rebel against use; quem penes arbitrium est, et vis et norma loquendi. It is not the observing of trochaics nor their iambics, that will make our writings aught the wiser: all their poesy and all their philosophy is nothing, unless we bring the discerning light of conceit with us to apply it to use. It is not books, but only that great book of the world, and the all-overspreading grace of Heaven that makes men truly judicial. Nor can it but touch of arrogant ignorance to hold this or that nation barbarous, these or those times gross, considering how this manifold creature man, wheresoever he stand in the world, hath always some disposition of worth, entertains the order of society, affects that which is most in use, and is eminent in some one thing or other that fits his humour or the times. The Grecians held all other nations barbarous but themselves; yet Pyrrhus, when he saw the well ordered marching of the Romans, which made them see their presumptuous error, could say it was no barbarous manner of proceeding. The Goths, Vandals, and Longobards, whose coming down like an inundation overwhelmed, as they say, all the glory of learning in Europe, have yet left us still their laws and customs, as the originals of most of the provincial constitutions of Christendom; which, well considered with their other courses of government, may serve to clear them from this imputation of ignorance. And though the vanquished never speak well of the conqueror, yet even through the unsound coverings of malediction appear these monuments of truth, as argue well their worth, and proves them not without judgment, though without Greek and Latin."

* * * * *

"To speak somewhat of these islands, being called, in old time, Insulæ fortunæ, by the means of the flourishing thereof. The fruitfulness of them doth surely exceed far all other that I have heard of. For they make wine better then any in Spain: and they have grapes of such bigness that they may be compared to damsons, and in taste inferior to none. For sugar, suckets, raisons of the sun, and many other fruits, abundance: for rosin, and raw silk, there is great store. They want neither corn, pullets, cattle, nor yet wild fowl.

"They have many camels also: which, being young, are eaten of the people for victuals; and being old, they are used for carriage of necessities. Whose property is, as he is taught, to kneel at the taking of his load, and the unlading again; of understanding very good, but of shape very deformed; with a little belly; long misshapen legs; and feet very broad of flesh, without a hoof, all whole saving the great toe; a back bearing up like a molehill, a large and thin neck, with a little head, with a bunch of hard flesh which Nature hath given him in his breast to lean upon. This beast liveth hardly, and is contented with straw and stubble; but of strong force, being well able to carry five hundredweight.

"In one of these islands called Ferro, there is, by the reports of the inhabitants, a certain tree which raineth continually; by the dropping whereof the inhabitants and cattle are satisfied with water: for other water have they none in all the island. And it raineth in such abundance that it were incredible unto a man to believe such a virtue to be in a tree; but it is known to be a Divine matter, and a thing ordained by God: at Whose power therein, we ought not to marvel, seeing He did, by His Providence (as we read in the Scriptures) when the Children of Israel were going into the Land of Promise, feed them with manna from heaven, for the space of forty years. Of these trees aforesaid, we saw in Guinea many; being of great height, dropping continually; but not so abundantly as the other, because the leaves are narrower and are like the leaves of a pear tree. About these islands are certain flitting islands, which have been oftentimes seen; and when men approach near them, they vanished: as the like hath been of these now known (by the report of the inhabitants) which were not found but of a long time, one after the other; and, therefore, it should seem he is not yet born, to whom God hath appointed the finding of them.

"In this island of Teneriff, there is a hill called the Pike, because it is piked; which is, in height, by their report, twenty leagues: having, both winter and summer, abundance of snow on the top of it. This Pike may be seen, in a clear day, fifty leagues off; but it sheweth as though it were a black cloud a great height in the element. I have heard of none to be compared with this in height; but in the Indies I have seen many, and, in my judgment, not inferior to the Pike: and so the Spaniards write."

One of the most remarkable developments of English prose at the time, and one which has until very recently been almost inaccessible, except in a few examples, to the student who has not the command of large libraries, while even by such students it has seldom been thoroughly examined, is the abundant and very miscellaneous collection of what are called, for want of a better name, Pamphlets. The term is not too happy, but there is no other (except the still less happy Miscellany) which describes the thing. It consists of a vast mass of purely popular literature, seldom written with any other aim than that of the modern journalist. That is to say, it was written to meet a current demand, to deal with subjects for one reason or other interesting at the moment, and, as a matter of course, to bring in some profit to the writer. These pamphlets are thus as destitute of any logical community of subject as the articles which compose a modern newspaper--a production the absence of which they no doubt supplied, and of which they were in a way the forerunners. Attempts to classify their subjects could only end in a hopeless cross division. They are religious very often; political very seldom (for the fate of the luckless Stubbes in his dealings with the French marriage was not suited to attract); politico-religious in at least the instance of one famous group, the so-called Martin Marprelate Controversy; moral constantly; in very many, especially the earlier instances, narrative, and following to a large extent in the steps of Lyly and Sidney; besides a large class of curious tracts dealing with the manners, and usually the bad side of the manners, of the town. Of the vast miscellaneous mass of these works by single unimportant or unknown authors it is almost impossible to give any account here, though valuable instances will be found of them in Mr. Arber's English Garner. But the works of the six most important individual writers of them--Greene, Nash, Harvey, Dekker, Lodge, Breton (to whom might be added the verse-pamphleteer, but in no sense poet, Rowlands)--are luckily now accessible as wholes, Lodge and Rowlands having been published, or at least privately printed for subscribers, by the Hunterian Club of Glasgow, and the other five by the prolific industry of Dr. Grosart. The reprints of Petheram and of Mr. Arber, with new editions of Lyly and others, have made most of the Marprelate tracts accessible. Some notice of these collections will not only give a fair idea of the entire miscellaneous prose of the Elizabethan period, but will also fill a distinct gap in most histories of it. It will not be necessary to enter into much personal detail about their authors, for most of them have been noticed already in other capacities, and of Breton and Rowlands very little indeed is known. Greene and Lodge stand apart from their fellows in this respect, that their work is, in some respects at any rate, much more like literature and less like journalism, though by an odd and apparently perverse chance, this difference has rather hurt than saved it in the estimation of posterity. For the kind of literature which both wrote in this way has gone out of fashion, and its purely literary graces are barely sufficient to save it from the point of view of form; while the bitter personalities of Nash, and the quaint adaptations of bygone satire to contemporary London life in which Dekker excelled, have a certain lasting interest of matter. On the other hand, the two companions of Marlowe have the advantage (which they little anticipated, and would perhaps less have relished) of surviving as illustrations of Shakespere, of the Shakescene who, decking himself out in their feathers, has by that act rescued Pandosto and Euphues' Golden Legacy from oblivion by associating them with the immortality of As You Like It and The Winter's Tale.

Owing to the different forms in which this fleeting and unequal work has been reprinted, it is not very easy to decide off-hand on the relative bulk of the authors' works. But the palm in this respect must be divided between Robert Greene and Nicholas Breton, the former of whom fills eleven volumes of loosely-printed crown octavo, and the latter (in prose only) a thick quarto of very small and closely-printed double columns. Greene, who began his work early under the immediate inspiration first of his travels and then of Lyly's Euphues, started, as early as 1583, with Mamillia, a Looking-Glass for the Ladies of England, which, both in general character and in peculiarities of style, is an obvious copy of Euphues. The Mirror of Modesty is more of a lay sermon, based on the story of Susanna. The Tritameron of Love is a dialogue without action, but Arbasto, or the Anatomie of Fortune returns to the novel form, as does The Card of Fancy. Planetomachia is a collection of stories, illustrating the popular astrological notions, with an introduction on astrology generally. Penelope's Web is another collection of stories, but The Spanish Masquerado is one of the most interesting of the series. Written just at the time of the Armada, it is pure journalism--a livre de circonstance composed to catch the popular temper with aid of a certain actual knowledge, and a fair amount of reading. Then Greene returned to euphuism in Menaphon, and in Euphues, his Censure to Philautus; nor are Perimedes the Blacksmith and Tully's Love much out of the same line. The Royal Exchange again deviates, being a very quaint collection, quaintly arranged, of moral maxims, apophthegms, short stories, etc., for the use of the citizens. Next, the author began the curious series, at first perhaps not very sincere, but certainly becoming so at last, of half-personal reminiscences and regrets, less pointed and well arranged than Villon's, but remarkably similar. The first and longest of these was Greene's Never too Late, with its second part Francesco's Fortunes. Greene's Metamorphosis is Euphuist once more, and Greene's Mourning Garment and Greene's Farewell to Folly are the same, with a touch of personality. Then he diverged into the still more curious series on "conny-catching"--rooking, gulling, cheating, as we should call it. There are five or six of these tracts, and though there is not a little bookmaking in them, they are unquestionably full of instruction as to the ways of the time. Philomela returns once more to euphuism, but Greene is soon back again with A Quip for an Upstart Courtier, a piece of social satire, flying rather higher than his previous attempts. The zigzag is kept up in Orpharion, the last printed (at least in the only edition now known) of the author's works during his lifetime. Not till after his death did the best known and most personal of all his works appear, the famous Groat's Worth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance, in which the "Shakescene" passage and the exhortation to his friends to repentance occur. Two more tracts in something the same style--Greene's Repentance and Greene's Vision--followed. Their genuineness has been questioned, but seems to be fairly certain.

This full list--to which must be added the already mentioned Pandosto, the Triumph of Time, or Dorastus and Fawnia, and the translated Debate between Folly and Love--of a certainly not scanty life-work (Greene died when he was quite a young man, and wrote plays besides) has been given, because it is not only the earliest, but perhaps the most characteristic of the whole. Despite the apparently unsuitable forms, it is evident that the writer is striving, without knowing it, at what we call journalism. But fashion and the absence of models cramp and distort his work. Its main features are to be found in the personal and satirical pieces, in the vivid and direct humanity of some touches in the euphuist tract-romances, in the delightful snatches of verse which intersperse and relieve the heterogeneous erudition, the clumsy dialogue, and the rococo style. The two following extracts give, the first a specimen of Greene's ornate and Euphuist style from Orpharion, the second a passage from his autobiographical or semi-autobiographical confessions in the Groat's Worth:--

"I am Lydia that renowned Princess, whose never matched beauty seemed like the gorgeous pomp of Phoebus, too bright for the day: rung so strongly out of the trump of Fame as it filled every ear with wonder: Daughter to Astolpho, the King of Lydia: who thought himself not so fortunate for his diadem, sith other kings could boast of crowns, nor for his great possessions, although endued with large territories, as happy that he had a daughter whose excellency in favour stained Venus, whose austere chastity set Diana to silence with a blush. Know whatsoever thou art that standest attentive to my tale, that the ruddiest rose in all Damasco, the whitest lilies in the creeks of Danuby, might not if they had united their native colours, but have bashed at the vermilion stain, flourish'd upon the pure crystal of my face: the Marguerites of the western Indies, counted more bright and rich than that which Cleopatra quaffed to Anthony, the coral highest in his pride upon the Afric shores, might well be graced to resemble my teeth and lips, but never honoured to overreach my pureness. Remaining thus the mirror of the world, and nature's strangest miracle, there arrived in our Court a Thracian knight, of personage tall, proportioned in most exquisite form, his face but too fair for his qualities, for he was a brave and a resolute soldier. This cavalier coming amongst divers others to see the royalty of the state of Lydia, no sooner had a glance of my beauty, but he set down his staff, resolving either to perish in so sweet a labyrinth, or in time happily to stumble out with Theseus. He had not stayed long in my father's court, but he shewed such knightly deeds of chivalry amongst the nobility, lightened with the extraordinary sparks of a courageous mind, that not only he was liked and loved of all the chief peers of the realms, but the report of his valour coming to my father's ears, he was highly honoured of him, and placed in short time as General of his warlike forces by land. Resting in this estimation with the king, preferment was no means to quiet his mind, for love had wounded so deep, as honour by no means might remedy, that as the elephants can hardly be haled from the sight of the waste, or the roe buck from gazing at red cloth, so there was no object that could so much allure the wavering eyes of this Thracian called Acestes, as the surpassing beauty of the Princess Lydia, yea, so deeply he doted, that as the Chameleon gorgeth herself with gazing into the air, so he fed his fancy with staring on the heavenly face of his Goddess, so long dallying in the flame, that he scorched his wings and in time consumed his whole body. Being thus passionate, having none so familiar as he durst make his confidant he fell thus to debate with himself."

* * * * *

"On the other side of the hedge sat one that heard his sorrow, who getting over, came towards him, and brake off his passion. When he approached, he saluted Roberto in this sort: Gentleman, quoth he (for so you seem) I have by chance heard you discourse some part of your grief; which appeareth to be more than you will discover, or I can conceit. But if you vouchsafe such simple comfort as my ability will yield, assure yourself, that I will endeavour to do the best, that either may procure your profit, or bring you pleasure: the rather, for that I suppose you are a scholar, and pity it is men of learning should live in lack.

"Roberto wondering to hear such good words, for that this iron age affords few that esteem of virtue; returned him thankful gratulations and (urged by necessity) uttered his present grief, beseeching his advice how he might be employed. 'Why, easily,' quoth he, 'and greatly to your benefit: for men of my profession get by scholars their whole living.' 'What is your profession?' said Roberto. 'Truly, sir,' said he, 'I am a player.' 'A player!' quoth Roberto. 'I took you rather for a gentleman of great living, for if by outward habit men should be censured, I tell you, you would be taken for a substantial man.' 'So am I, where I dwell' (quoth the player) 'reputed able, at my proper cost, to build a windmill. What though the world once went hard with me, when I was fain to carry my playing fardel a foot-back; Tempora mutantur, I know you know the meaning of it better than I, but I thus construe it; it is otherwise now; for my very share in playing apparel will not be sold for two hundred pounds.' 'Truly' (said Roberto) 'it is strange that you should so prosper in that vain practise, for that it seems to me your voice is nothing gracious.' 'Nay, then,' said the player, 'I mislike your judgment: why, I am as famous for Delphrigas, and the King of Fairies, as ever was any of my time. The twelve labours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage, and placed three scenes of the devil on the highway to heaven.' 'Have ye so?' (said Roberto) 'then I pray you, pardon me.' 'Nay more' (quoth the player) 'I can serve to make a pretty speech, for I was a country author, passing at a moral, for it was I that penn'd the moral of man's wit, the Dialogue of Dives, and for seven years' space was absolute interpreter of the puppets. But now my Almanach is out of date.

The people make no estimation Of morals teaching education.

Was not this pretty for a plain rhyme extempore? if ye will ye shall have more.' 'Nay, it is enough,' said Roberto, 'but how mean you to use me?' 'Why, sir, in making plays,' said the other, 'for which you shall be well paid, if you will take the pains.'"

These same characteristics, though without the prevailing and in part obviously sincere melancholy which marks Greene's regrets, also distinguish Lodge's prose work to such an extent that remarks on the two might sometimes be made simply interchangeable. But fortune was kinder to Lodge than to his friend and collaborator. Nor does he seem to have had any occasion to "tread the burning marl" in company with conny-catchers and their associates. Lodge began with critical and polemical work--an academic if not very urbane reply to Stephen Gosson's School of Abuse; but in the Alarum against Usurers, which resembles and even preceded Greene's similar work, he took to the satirical-story-form. Indeed, the connection between Lodge and Greene was so close, and the difficulty of ascertaining the exact dates of their compositions is so great, that it is impossible to be sure which was the precise forerunner. Certainly if Lodge set Greene an example in the Alarum against Usurers, he followed Greene's lead in Forbonius and Prisceria some years afterwards, having written it on shipboard in a venture against the Spaniards. Lodge produced much the most famous book of the euphuist school, next to Euphues itself, as well as the best known of this pamphlet series, in Rosalynde or Euphues' Golden Legacy, from which Shakespere took the story of As You Like It, and of which an example follows:--

"'Ah Phoebe,' quoth he, 'whereof art thou made, that thou regardest not thy malady? Am I so hateful an object, that thine eyes condemn me for an abject? or so base, that thy desires cannot stoop so low as to lend me a gracious look? My passions are many, my loves more, my thoughts loyalty, and my fancy faith: all devoted in humble devoir to the service of Phoebe; and shall I reap no reward for such fealties? The swain's daily labours is quit with the evening's hire, the ploughman's toil is eased with the hope of corn, what the ox sweats out at the plough he fatteneth at the crib: but unfortunate Montanus hath no salve for his sorrows, nor any hope of recompense for the hazard of his perplexed passions. If Phoebe, time may plead the proof of my truth, twice seven winters have I loved fair Phoebe: if constancy be a cause to further my suit, Montanus' thoughts have been sealed in the sweet of Phoebe's excellence, as far from change as she from love: if outward passions may discover inward affections, the furrows in my face may discover the sorrows of my heart, and the map of my looks the grief of my mind. Thou seest (Phoebe) the tears of despair have made my cheeks full of wrinkles, and my scalding sighs have made the air echo her pity conceived in my plaints; Philomel hearing my passions, hath left her mournful tunes to listen to the discourse of miseries. I have portrayed in every tree the beauty of my mistress, and the despair of my loves. What is it in the woods cannot witness my woes? and who is it would not pity my plaints? only Phoebe. And why? Because I am Montanus, and she Phoebe: I a worthless swain, and she the most excellent of all fairies. Beautiful Phoebe! oh might I say pitiful, then happy were I though I tasted but one minute of that good hap. Measure Montanus, not by his fortunes, but by his loves, and balance not his wealth but his desires, and lend but one gracious look to cure a heap of disquieted cares: if not, ah if Phoebe cannot love, let a storm of frowns end the discontent of my thoughts, and so let me perish in my desires, because they are above my deserts: only at my death this favour cannot be denied me, that all shall say Montanus died for love of hard hearted Phoebe.' At these words she filled her face full of frowns and made him this short and sharp reply.

"'Importunate shepherd, whose loves are lawless because restless: are thy passions so extreme, that thou canst not conceal them with patience? or art thou so folly-sick, that thou must needs be fancy-sick, and in thy affection tied to such an exigent as none serves but Phoebe? Well, sir, if your market can be made nowhere else, home again, for your mart is at the fairest. Phoebe is no lettuce for your lips, and her grapes hang so high, that gaze at them you may, but touch them you cannot. Yet Montanus I speak not this in pride, but in disdain: not that I scorn thee, but that I hate love: for I count it as great honour to triumph over fancy as over fortune. Rest thee content therefore Montanus, cease from thy loves, and bridle thy looks, quench the sparkles before they grow to a farther flame; for in loving me, thou shalt but live by loss, and what thou utterest in words are all written in the wind. Wert thou (Montanus) as fair as Paris, as hardy as Hector, as constant as Troilus, as loving as Leander, Phoebe could not love, because she cannot love at all: and therefore if thou pursue me with Phoebus, I must flie with Daphne.'"

The Silvius, it may be just necessary to observe, of As You Like It.

This book seems to have been very successful, and Lodge began to write pamphlets vigorously, sometimes taking up the social satire, sometimes the moral treatise, sometimes (and then most happily) the euphuist romance, salted with charming poems. His last prose work in this kind (he wrote other things later) was the pretty and prettily-named Margarite of America, in 1596.

The names of Nash and Harvey are intertwined even more closely than those of Greene and Lodge; but the conjunction is not a grasp of friendship but a grip of hatred--a wrestle, not an embrace. The fact of the quarrel has attracted rather disproportionate attention from the days of Isaac Disraeli onwards; and its original cause is still extremely obscure and very unimportant. By some it is connected, causally as well as accidentally, with the Martin Marprelate business; by some with the fact that Harvey belonged to the inner Sidneian clique, Nash to the outer ring of professional journalists and Bohemians. It at any rate produced some remarkable varieties of the pamphlet, and demonstrated the keen interest which the world takes in the proceedings of any couple of literary men who choose to abuse and befoul one another. Harvey, though no mean scholar, was in mere writing no match for Nash; and his chief answer to the latter, Pierce's Supererogation, is about as rambling, incoherent, and ineffective a combination of pedantry and insolence as need be wished for. It has some not uninteresting, though usually very obscure, hints on literary matters. Besides this, Harvey wrote letters to Spenser with their well-known criticism and recommendation of classical forms, and Foure Letters Touching Robert Greene and Others: with the Trimming of Thomas Nash, Gentleman. A sample of him, not in his abusive-dull, but in his scholarly-dull manner, may be given:--

"Mine own rules and precepts of art, I believe will fall out not greatly repugnant, though peradventure somewhat different: and yet I am not so resolute, but I can be content to reserve the copying out and publishing thereof, until I have a little better consulted with my pillow, and taken some further advice of Madame Sperienza. In the mean time, take this for a general caveat, and say I have revealed one great mystery unto you: I am of opinion, there is no one more regular and justifiable direction, either for the assured and infallible certainty of our English artificial prosody particularly, or generally to bring our language into art, and to frame a grammar or rhetoric thereof; than first of all universally to agree upon one and the same orthography in all points conformable and proportionate to our common natural prosody: whether Sir Thomas Smithies in that respect be the most perfit, as surely it must needs be very good; or else some other of profounder learning and longer experience, than Sir Thomas was, shewing by necessary demonstration, wherein he is defective, will undertake shortly to supply his wants and make him more absolute. Myself dare not hope to hop after him, till I see something or other, to or fro, publicly and authentically established, as it were by a general council, or Act of Parliament: and then peradventure, standing upon firmer ground, for company sake, I may adventure to do as others do. Interim, credit me, I dare give no precepts, nor set down any certain general art: and yet see my boldness, I am not greatly squeamish of my Particular Examples, whereas he that can but reasonably skill of the one, will give easily a shrewd guess at the other: considering that the one fetcheth his original and offspring from the other. In which respect, to say troth, we beginners have the start, and advantage of our followers, who are to frame and conform both their examples and precepts, according to precedent which they have of us: as no doubt Homer or some other in Greek, and Ennius, or I know not who else in Latin, did prejudice, and overrule those that followed them, as well for the quantities of syllables, as number of feet, and the like: their only examples going for current payment, and standing instead of laws, and rules with the posterity."

In Harvey, more perhaps than anywhere else in prose, appears the abusive exaggeration, not humorous or Rabelaisian, but simply rancorous and dull, which mars so much Elizabethan work. In order not to fall into the same error ourselves, we must abstain from repeating the very strong language which has sometimes been applied to his treatment of dead men, and such dead men as Greene and Marlowe, for apparently no other fault than their being friends of his enemy Nash. It is sufficient to say that Harvey had all the worst traits of "donnishness," without having apparently any notion of that dignity which sometimes half excuses the don. He was emphatically of Mr. Carlyle's "acrid-quack" genus.

Thomas Nash will himself hardly escape the charge of acridity, but only injustice or want of discernment will call him a quack. Unlike Harvey, but like Greene and Lodge, he was a verse as well as a prose writer. But his verse is in comparison unimportant. Nor was he tempted to intersperse specimens of it in his prose work. The absolutely best part of that work--the Anti-Martinist pamphlets to be noticed presently--is only attributed to him conjecturally, though the grounds of attribution are very strong. But his characteristics are fully evident in his undoubted productions. The first of these in pamphlet form is the very odd thing called Pierce Penniless [the name by which Nash became known], his Supplication to the Devil. It is a kind of rambling condemnation of luxury, for the most part delivered in the form of burlesque exhortation, which the mediæval sermons joyeux had made familiar in all European countries. Probably some allusions in this refer to Harvey, whose pragmatical pedantry may have in many ways annoyed Nash, a Cambridge man like himself. At any rate the two soon plunged into a regular battle, the documents of which on Nash's side are, first a prognostication, something in the style of Rabelais, then a formal confutation of the Four Letters, and then the famous lampoon entitled Have with you to Saffron Walden [Harvey's birthplace], of which here is a specimen:--

"His father he undid to furnish him to the Court once more, where presenting himself in all the colours of the rainbow, and a pair of moustaches like a black horse tail tied up in a knot, with two tufts sticking out on each side, he was asked by no mean personage, Unde hæc insania? whence proceedeth this folly or madness? and he replied with that weather-beaten piece of a verse out of the Grammar, Semel insanivimus omnes, once in our days there is none of us but have played the idiots; and so was he counted and bade stand by for a Nodgscomb. He that most patronized him, prying more searchingly into him, and finding that he was more meet to make sport with than any way deeply to be employed, with fair words shook him off, and told him he was fitter for the University, than for the Court or his turn, and so bade God prosper his studies, and sent for another Secretary to Oxford.

"Readers, be merry; for in me there shall want nothing I can do to make you merry. You see I have brought the Doctor out of request at Court, and it shall cost me a fall, but I will get him hooted out of the University too, ere I give him over. What will you give me when I bring him upon the Stage in one of the principalest Colleges in Cambridge? Lay any wager with me, and I will; or if you lay no wager at all, I'll fetch him aloft in Pedantius, that exquisite Comedy in Trinity College; where under the chief part, from which it took his name, as namely the concise and firking finicaldo fine School master, he was full drawn and delineated from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head. The just manner of his phrase in his Orations and Disputations they stuffed his mouth with, and no Buffianism throughout his whole books, but they bolstered out his part with; as those ragged remnants in his four familiar epistles 'twixt him and Senior Immerito, raptim scripta, noste manum et stylum, with innumerable other of his rabble-routs: and scoffing his Musarum Lachrymæ with Flebo amorem meum etiam musarum lachrymis; which, to give it his due, was a more collachrymate wretched Treatise than my Piers Penniless, being the pitifulest pangs that ever any man's Muse breathed forth. I leave out half; not the carrying up of his gown, his nice gait on his pantoffles, or the affected accent of his speech, but they personated. And if I should reveal all, I think they borrowed his gown to play the part in, the more to flout him. Let him deny this (and not damn himself) for his life if he can. Let him deny that there was a Shew made at Clare Hall of him and his two brothers, called,

"Tarra, rantantara turba tumultuosa Trigonum Tri-Harveyorum Tri-harmonia

Let him deny that there was another Shew made of the little Minnow his brother, Dodrans Dick, at Peter-house called,

"Duns furens. Dick Harvey in a frensy.

Whereupon Dick came and broke the College glass windows; and Doctor Perne (being then either for himself or deputy Vice-Chancellor) caused him to be fetched in, and set in the Stocks till the Shew was ended, and a great part of the night after."

The Terrors of the Night, a discourse of apparitions, for once, among these oddly-named pieces, tells a plain story. Its successor, Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, Nash's longest book, is one of those rather enigmatical expressions of repentance for loose life which were so common at the time, and which, according to the charity of the reader, may be attributed to real feeling, to a temporary access of Katzen-jammer, or to downright hypocrisy, bent only on manufacturing profitable "copy," and varying its style to catch different tastes. The most unfavourable hypothesis is probably unjust, and a certain tone of sincerity also runs through the next book, The Unfortunate Traveller, in which Nash, like many others, inveighs against the practice of sending young Englishmen to be corrupted abroad. It is noteworthy that this (the place of which in the history of the novel has been rather exaggerated) is the oldest authority for the romance of Surrey and Geraldine; but it is uncertain whether this was pure invention on Nash's part or not. Nash's Lenten Stuff is very interesting, being a panegyric on Great Yarmouth and its famous staple commodity (though Nash was actually born at Lowestoft).

In Nash's work we find a style both of treatment and language entirely different from anything of Greene's or Lodge's. He has no euphuism, his forte being either extravagant burlesque (in which the influence of Rabelais is pretty directly perceptible, while he himself acknowledges indebtedness to some other sources, such as Bullen or Bullein, a dialogue writer of the preceding generation), or else personal attack, boisterous and unscrupulous, but often most vigorous and effective. Diffuseness and want of keeping to the point too frequently mar Nash's work; but when he shakes himself free from them, and goes straight for his enemy or his subject, he is a singularly forcible writer. In his case more than in any of the others, the journalist born out of due time is perceptible. He had perhaps not much original message for the world. But he had eminently the trick both of damaging controversial argument made light to catch the popular taste, and of easy discussion or narrative. The chief defects of his work would probably have disappeared of themselves if he had had to write not pamphlets, but articles. He did, however, what he could; and he is worthy of a place in the history of literature if only for the sake of Have with you to Saffron Walden--the best example of its own kind to be found before the end of the seventeenth century, if not the beginning of the eighteenth.

Thomas Dekker was much less of a born prose writer than his half-namesake, Nash. His best work, unlike Nash's, was done in verse, and, while he was far Nash's superior, not merely in poetical expression but in creative grasp of character, he was entirely destitute of Nash's incisive and direct faculty of invective. Nevertheless his work, too, is memorable among the prose work of the time, and for special reasons. His first pamphlet (according to the peculiarity already noted in Rowlands's case) is not prose at all, but verse--yet not the verse of which Dekker had real mastery, being a very lamentable ballad of the destruction of Jerusalem, entitled Canaan's Calamity (1598). The next, The Wonderful Year, is the account of London in plague time, and has at least the interest of being comparable with, and perhaps that of having to some extent inspired, Defoe's famous performance. Then, and of the same date, follows a very curious piece, the foreign origin of which has not been so generally noticed as that of Dekker's most famous prose production. The Bachelor's Banquet is in effect only a free rendering of the immortal fifteenth century satire, assigned on no very solid evidence to Antoine de la Salle, the Quinze Joyes de Mariage, the resemblance being kept down to the recurrence at the end of each section of the same phrase, "in Lob's pound," which reproduces the less grotesque "dans la nasse" of the original. But here, as later, the skill with which Dekker adapts and brings in telling circumstances appropriate to his own day deserves every acknowledgment. Dekker's Dreame is chiefly verse and chiefly pious; and then at a date somewhat later than that of our present period, but connected with it by the fact of authorship, begins a very interesting series of pieces, more vivid if somewhat less well written than Greene's, and connected with his "conny-catching" course. The Bellman of London, Lanthorn and Candlelight, A Strange Horse-Race, The Seven Deadly Sins of London, News from Hell, The Double P.P., and The Gull's Hornbook, are all pamphlets of this class; the chief interest resting in News from Hell (which, according to the author's scheme, connects itself with Nash's Pierce Penniless, and is the devil's answer thereto) and The Gull's Hornbook (1609). This last, the best known of Dekker's work, is an Englishing of the no less famous Grobianus of Frederick Dedekind, and the same skill of adaptation which was noticed in The Bachelor's Banquet is observable here. The spirit of these works seems to have been so popular that Dekker kept it up in The Dead Term [long vacation], Work for Armourers (which, however, is less particular and connects itself with Nash's sententious work), The Raven's Almanack, and A Rod for Runaways (1625). The Four Birds of Noah's Ark, which Dr. Grosart prints last, is of a totally different character, being purely a book of piety. It is thus inferior in interest to the series dealing with the low life of London, which contains most curious studies of the ancient order of ragamuffins (as a modern satirist has pleasantly called them), and bears altogether marks of greater sincerity than the parallel studies of other writers. For about Dekker, hack and penny-a-liner as he undoubtedly was, there was a simplicity, a truth to nature, and at the same time a faculty of dramatic presentation in which Greene, Lodge, and Nash were wholly wanting; and his prose pamphlets smack of these good gifts in their measure as much as The Honest Whore. Indeed, on the whole, he seems to be the most trustworthy of these chroniclers of the English picaroons; and one feels disposed to believe that if the things which he tells did not actually happen, something very like them was probably happening every day in London during the time of "Eliza and our James." For the time of Eliza and our James was by no means a wholly heroic period, and it only loses, not gains, by the fiction that every man of letters was a Spenser and every man of affairs a Sidney or even a Raleigh. Extracts from The Seven Deadly Sins and The Gull's Hornbook may be given:--

"O Candle-light! and art thou one of the cursed crew? hast thou been set at the table of Princes and Noblemen? have all sorts of people done reverence unto thee, and stood bare so soon as ever they have seen thee? have thieves, traitors, and murderers been afraid to come in thy presence, because they knew thee just, and that thou wouldest discover them? And art thou now a harbourer of all kinds of vices? nay, dost thou play the capital Vice thyself? Hast thou had so many learned Lectures read before thee, and is the light of thy understanding now clean put out, and have so many profound scholars profited by thee? hast thou done such good to Universities, been such a guide to the lame, and seen the doing of so many good works, yet dost thou now look dimly, and with a dull eye, upon all goodness? What comfort have sick men taken (in weary and irksome nights) but only in thee? thou hast been their physician and apothecary, and when the relish of nothing could please them, the very shadow of thee hath been to them a restorative consolation. The nurse hath stilled her wayward infant, shewing it but to thee: What gladness hast thou put into mariners' bosoms when thou hast met them on the sea! What joy into the faint and benighted traveller when he has met thee on the land! How many poor handicraftsmen by thee have earned the best part of their living! And art thou now become a companion for drunkards, for leachers, and for prodigals? Art thou turned reprobate? thou wilt burn for it in hell. And so odious is this thy apostasy, and hiding thyself from the light of the truth, that at thy death and going out of the world, even they that love thee best will tread thee under their feet: yea, I that have thus played the herald, and proclaimed thy good parts, will now play the crier and call thee into open court, to arraign thee for thy misdemeanours."

* * * * *

"For do but consider what an excellent thing sleep is: it is so inestimable a jewel that, if a tyrant would give his crown for an hour's slumber, it cannot be bought: of so beautiful a shape is it, that though a man lie with an Empress, his heart cannot be at quiet till he leaves her embracements to be at rest with the other: yea, so greatly indebted are we to this kinsman of death, that we owe the better tributary, half of our life to him: and there is good cause why we should do so: for sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Who complains of want? of wounds? of cares? of great men's oppressions? of captivity? whilst he sleepeth? Beggars in their beds take as much pleasure as kings: can we therefore surfeit on this delicate Ambrosia? can we drink too much of that whereof to taste too little tumbles us into a churchyard, and to use it but indifferently throws us into Bedlam? No, no, look upon Endymion, the moon's minion, who slept three score and fifteen years, and was not a hair the worse for it. Can lying abed till noon (being not the three score and fifteenth thousand part of his nap) be hurtful?

"Besides, by the opinion of all philosophers and physicians, it is not good to trust the air with our bodies till the sun with his flame-coloured wings hath fanned away the misty smoke of the morning, and refined that thick tobacco-breath which the rheumatic night throws abroad of purpose to put out the eye of the element: which work questionless cannot be perfectly finished till the sun's car-horses stand prancing on the very top of highest noon: so that then (and not till then) is the most healthful hour to be stirring. Do you require examples to persuade you? At what time do Lords and Ladies use to rise but then? Your simpering merchants' wives are the fairest lyers in the world: and is not eleven o'clock their common hour? they find (no doubt) unspeakable sweetness in such lying, else they would not day by day put it so in practice. In a word, mid-day slumbers are golden; they make the body fat, the skin fair, the flesh plump, delicate and tender; they set a russet colour on the cheeks of young women, and make lusty courage to rise up in men; they make us thrifty, both in sparing victuals (for breakfasts thereby are saved from the hell-mouth of the belly) and in preserving apparel; for while we warm us in our beds our clothes are not worn.

"The casements of thine eyes being then at this commendable time of the day newly set open, choose rather to have thy wind-pipe cut in pieces than to salute any man. Bid not good-morrow so much as to thy father, though he be an emperor. An idle ceremony it is and can do him little good; to thyself it may bring much harm: for if he be a wise man that knows how to hold his peace, of necessity must he be counted a fool that cannot keep his tongue."

The voluminous work in pamphlet kind of Nicholas Breton, still more the verse efforts closely akin to it of Samuel Rowlands, John Davies of Hereford and some others, must be passed over with very brief notice. Dr. Grosart's elaborate edition of the first-named has given a vast mass of matter very interesting to the student of literature, but which cannot be honestly recommended to the general reader. Breton, whose long life and perpetual literary activity fill up great part of our whole period, was an Essex gentleman of a good family (a fact which he never forgot), and apparently for some time a dependent of the well-known Countess of Pembroke, Sidney's sister. A much older man than most of the great wits of Elizabeth's reign, he also survived most of them, and his publications, if not his composition, cover a full half century, though he was nel mezzo del cammin at the date of the earliest. He was probably born some years before the middle of the sixteenth century, and certainly did not die before the first year of Charles I. If we could take as his the charming lullaby of The Arbour of Amorous Devices he would stand (if only as a kind of "single-speech") high as a poet. But I fear that Dr. Grosart's attribution of it to him is based on little external and refuted by all internal evidence. His best certain thing is the pretty "Phillida and Corydon" idyll, which may be found in England's Helicon or in Mr. Ward's Poets. But I own that I can never read this latter without thinking of two lines of Fulke Greville's in the same metre and on no very different theme--

"O'er enamelled meads they went, Quiet she, he passion-rent,"

which are simply worth all the works of Breton, prose and verse, unless we count the Lullaby, put together. In the mots rayonnants, the mots de lumière, he is sadly deficient. But his work (which is nearly as plentiful in verse as in prose) is, as has been said, very interesting to the literary student, because it shows better perhaps than anything else the style of literature which a man, disdaining to condescend to burlesque or bawdry, not gifted with any extraordinary talent, either at prose or verse, but possessed of a certain literary faculty, could then produce with a fair chance of being published and bought. It cannot be said that the result shows great daintiness in Breton's public. The verse, with an improvement in sweetness and fluency, is very much of the doggerel style which was prevalent before Spenser; and the prose, though showing considerable faculty, if not of invention, yet of adroit imitation of previously invented styles, is devoid of distinction and point. There are, however, exercises after Breton's own fashion in almost every popular style of the time--euphuist romances, moral treatises, packets of letters, collections of jests and short tales, purely religious tractates, characters (after the style later illustrated by Overbury and Earle), dialogues, maxims, pictures of manners, collections of notes about foreign countries,--in fact, the whole farrago of the modern periodical. The pervading characteristics are Breton's invariable modesty, his pious and, if I may be permitted to use the word, gentlemanly spirit, and a fashion of writing which, if not very pointed, picturesque, or epigrammatic, is clear, easy, and on the whole rather superior, in observance of the laws of grammar and arrangement, to the work of men of much greater note in his day.

The verse pamphlets of Rowlands (whom I have not studied as thoroughly as most others), Davies, and many less voluminous men, are placed here with all due apology for the liberty. They are seldom or never of much formal merit, but they are interesting, first, because they testify to the hold which the mediæval conception of verse, as a general literary medium as suitable as prose and more attractive, had upon men even at this late time; and secondly, because, like the purely prose pamphlets, they are full of information as to the manners of the time. For Rowlands I may refer to Mr. Gosse's essay. John Davies of Hereford, the writing-master, though he has been carefully edited for students, and is by no means unworthy of study, has had less benefit of exposition to the general reader. He was not a genius, but he is a good example of the rather dull man who, despite the disfavour of circumstance, contrives by much assiduity and ingenious following of models to attain a certain position in literature. There are John Davieses of Hereford in every age, but since the invention and filing of newspapers their individuality has been not a little merged. The anonymous journalist of our days is simply to the historian such and such a paper, volume so-and-so, page so much, column this or that. The good John Davies, living in another age, still stands as nominis umbra, but with a not inconsiderable body of work to throw the shadow.

One of the most remarkable, and certainly one of not the least interesting developments of the Elizabethan pamphlet remains to be noticed. This is the celebrated series of "Martin Marprelate" tracts, with the replies which they called forth. Indeed the popularity of this series may be said to have given a great impulse to the whole pamphleteering system. It is somewhat unfortunate that this interesting subject has never been taken up in full by a dispassionate historian of literature, sufficiently versed in politics and in theology. In mid-nineteenth century most, but by no means all of the more notable tracts were reprinted by John Petheram, a London bookseller, whose productions have since been issued under the well-known imprint of John Russell Smith, the publisher of the Library of Old Authors. This gave occasion to a review in The Christian Remembrancer, afterwards enlarged and printed as a book by Mr. Maskell, a High Churchman who subsequently seceded to the Church of Rome. This latter accident has rather unfavourably and unfairly affected later judgments of his work, which, however, is certainly not free from party bias. It has scarcely been less unlucky that the chief recent dealers with the matter, Professor Arber (who projected a valuable reprint of the whole series in his English Scholars' Library, and who prefaced it with a quite invaluable introductory sketch), and Dr. Grosart, who also included divers Anti-Martinist tracts in his privately printed Works of Nashe, are very strongly prejudiced on the Puritan side. Between these authorities the dispassionate inquirer who attacks the texts for himself is likely to feel somewhat in the position of a man who exposes himself to a cross fire. The Martin Marprelate controversy, looked at without prejudice but with sufficient information, shows itself as a very early example of the reckless violence of private crotcheteers on the one hand, and of the rather considerable unwisdom of the official defenders of order on the other. "Martin's" method was to a certain extent an anticipation of the famous move by which Pascal, fifty years later, "took theology out of the schools into drawing-rooms," except that Martin and his adversaries transferred the venue rather to the tap-room than to the drawing-room. The controversy between the framers of the Church of England in its present state, and the hot gospellers who, with Thomas Cartwright at their head, denied the proposition (not deniable or denied now by any sane and scholarly disputant) that church discipline and government are points left to a great extent undefined in the Scriptures, had gone on for years before Martin appeared. Cartwright and Whitgift had fought, with a certain advantage of warmth and eloquence on Cartwright's side, and with an immense preponderance of logical cogency on Whitgift's. Many minor persons had joined in the struggle, and at last a divine, more worthy than wise, John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, had produced on the orthodox side one of those enormous treatises (it had some fifteen hundred quarto pages) which are usually left unread by the side they favour, and which exasperate the side they oppose. The ordinary law of the time, moreover, which placed large powers in the hands of the bishops, and especially entrusted them with a rigid and complete censorship of the press, had begun to be put in force severely against the more outspoken partisans. Any one who will take the trouble to read the examination of Henry Barrow, which Mr. Arber has reprinted, or even the "moderate" tracts of Nicholas Udall, which in a manner ushered in the Marprelate controversy, will probably be more surprised at the long-suffering of the judges than at the sufferings of their prisoners. Barrow, in a long and patient examination before the council, of which the Bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury were members, called them to their faces the one a "wolf," a "bloody persecutor," and an "apostate," the other "a monster" and "the second beast that is spoken of in the Revelations." The "moderate" Udall, after publishing a dialogue (in which an Anglican bishop called Diotrephes is represented, among other things, as planning measures against the Puritans in consort with a papist and an usurer), further composed a Demonstration of Discipline in which, writing, according to Mr. Arber, "without any satire or invective," he calls the bishops merely qua bishops, "the wretched fathers of a filthy mother," with abundant epithets to match, and rains down on every practice of the existing church government such terms as "blasphemous," "damnable," "hellish," and the like. To the modern reader who looks at these things with the eyes of the present day, it may of course seem that it would have been wiser to let the dogs bark. But that was not the principle of the time: and as Mr. Arber most frankly admits, it was certainly not the principle of the dogs themselves. The Puritans claimed for themselves a not less absolute right to call in the secular arm if they could, and a much more absolute certainty and righteousness for their tenets than the very hottest of their adversaries.

This prejudice is naturally still stronger in some American writers, notably Dr. Dexter.

Arber, Introductory Sketch. p. 40 sqq. All the quotations and references which follow will be found in Arber's and Petheram's reprints or in Grosart's Nash, vol. 1. If the works cited are not given as wholes in them, the fact will be noted. (See also Mr. Bond's Lyly.)

Udall was directly, as well as indirectly, the begetter of the Martin Marprelate controversy: though after he got into trouble in connection with it, he made a sufficiently distinct expression of disapproval of the Martinist methods, and it seems to have been due more to accident and his own obstinacy than anything else that he died in prison instead of being obliged with the honourable banishment of a Guinea chaplaincy. His printer, Waldegrave, had had his press seized and his license withdrawn for Diotrephes, and resentment at this threw what, in the existing arrangements of censorship and the Stationers' monopoly, was a very difficult thing to obtain--command of a practical printer--into the hands of the malcontents. Chief among these malcontents was a certain Reverend John Penry, a Welshman by birth, a member, as was then not uncommon, of both universities, and the author, among other more dubious publications, of a plea, intemperately stated in parts, but very sober and sensible at bottom, for a change in the system of allotting and administering the benefices of the church in Wales. Which plea, be it observed in passing, had it been attended to, it would have been better for both the church and state of England at this day. The pamphlet contained, however, a distinct insinuation against the Queen, of designedly keeping Wales in ignorance and subjection--an insinuation which, in those days, was equivalent to high treason. The book was seized, and the author imprisoned (1587). Now when, about a year after, and in the very height of the danger from the Armada, Waldegrave's livelihood was threatened by the proceedings above referred to, it would appear that he obtained from the Continent, or had previously secreted from his confiscated stock, printing tools, and that he and Penry, at the house of Mistress Crane, at East Molesey, in Surrey, printed a certain tract, called, for shortness, "The Epistle." This tract, of the authorship and character of which more presently, created a great sensation. It was immediately followed, the press being shifted for safety to the houses of divers Puritan country gentlemen, by the promised Epitome. So great was the stir, that a formal answer of great length was put forth by "T. C." (well known to be Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester), entitled, An Admonition to the People of England. The Martinists, from their invisible and shifting citadel, replied with perhaps the cleverest tract of the whole controversy, named, with deliberate quaintness, Hay any Work for Cooper? ("Have You any Work for the Cooper?" said to be an actual trade London cry). Thenceforward the mêlée of pamphlets, answers, "replies, duplies, quadruplies," became in small space indescribable. Petheram's prospectus of reprints (only partially carried out) enumerates twenty-six, almost all printed in the three years 1588-1590; Mr. Arber, including preliminary works, counts some thirty. The perambulating press was once seized (at Newton Lane, near Manchester), but Martin was not silenced. It is certain (though there are no remnants extant of the matter concerned) that Martin was brought on the stage in some form or other, and though the duration of the controversy was as short as its character was hot, it was rather suppressed than extinguished by the death of Udall in prison, and the execution of Penry and Barrow in 1593.

Large extracts from it are given by Arber.

As the titles of these productions are highly characteristic of the style of the controversy, and, indeed, are sometimes considerably more poignant than the text, it may be well to give some of them in full as follows:--

The Epistle.--Oh read over D. John Bridges, for it is a worthy work: Or an Epitome of the first book of that right worshipful volume, written against the Puritans, in the defence of the noble Clergy, by as worshipful a Priest, John Bridges, Presbyter, Priest or Elder, Doctor of Divillity [sic], and Dean of Sarum, Wherein the arguments of the Puritans are wisely presented, that when they come to answer M. Doctor, they must needs say something that hath been spoken. Compiled for the behoof and overthrow of the Parsons Fyckers and Currats [sic] that have learnt their catechisms, and are past grace: by the reverend and worthy Martin Marprelate, gentleman, and dedicated to the Confocation [sic] house. The Epitome is not yet published, but it shall be when the Bishops are at convenient leisure to view the same. In the mean time let them be content with this learned Epistle. Printed, oversea, in Europe, within two furlongs of a Bouncing Priest, at the cost and charges of M. Marprelate, gentleman.

Hay any work for Cooper, or a brief pistle directed by way of an hublication [sic] to the reverend bishops, counselling them if they will needs be barrelled up for fear of smelling in the nostrils of her Majesty and the State, that they would use the advice of Reverend Martin for the providing of their Cooper; because the Reverend T. C. (by which mystical letters is understood either the bouncing parson of East Meon or Tom Cokes his chaplain), hath shewed himself in his late admonition to the people of England to be an unskilful and beceitful [sic] tub-trimmer. Wherein worthy Martin quits him like a man, I warrant you in the modest defence of his self and his learned pistles, and makes the Cooper's hoops to fly off, and the bishops' tubs to leak out of all cry. Penned and compiled by Martin the metropolitan. Printed in Europe, not far from some of the bouncing priests.

The actual authorship of the Martinist Tracts is still purely a matter of hypothesis. Penry has been the general favourite, and perhaps the argument from the difference of style in his known works is not quite convincing. The American writer Dr. Dexter, a fervent admirer, as stated above, of the Puritans, is for Barrow. Mr. Arber thinks that a gentleman of good birth named Job Throckmorton, who was certainly concerned in the affair, was probably the author of the more characteristic passages. Fantastic suggestions of Jesuit attempts to distract the Anglican Church have also been made,--attempts sufficiently refuted by the improbability of the persons known to be concerned lending themselves to such an intrigue, for, hotheads as Penry and the rest were, they were transparently honest. On the side of the defence, authorship is a little better ascertained. Of Cooper's work there is no doubt, and some purely secular men of letters were oddly mixed up in the affair. It is all but certain that John Lyly wrote the so-called Pap with a Hatchet, which in deliberate oddity of phrase, scurrility of language, and desultoriness of method outvies the wildest Martinist outbursts. The later tract, An Almond for a Parrot, which deserves a very similar description, may not improbably be the same author's; and Dr. Grosart has reasonably attributed four anti-Martinist tracts (A Countercuff to Martin Junior [Martin Junior was one of the Marprelate treatises], Pasquil's Return, Martin's Month's Mind, and Pasquil's Apology), to Nash. But the discussion of such questions comes but ill within the limits of such a book as the present.

Pap with a Hatchet, alias A fig for my godson! or Crack me this nut, or A country cuff that is a sound box of the ear for the idiot Martin for to hold his peace, seeing the patch will take no warning. Written by one that dares call a dog a dog, and made to prevent Martin's dog-days. Imprinted by John-a-noke and John-a-stile for the baylive [sic] of Withernam, cum privilegio perennitatis; and are to be sold at the sign of the crab-tree-cudgel in Thwackcoat Lane. A sentence. Martin hangs fit for my mowing.

An Almond for a Parrot, or Cuthbert Curryknaves alms. Fit for the knave Martin, and the rest of those impudent beggars that cannot be content to stay their stomachs with a benefice, but they will needs break their fasts with our bishops. Rimarum sum plenus. Therefore beware, gentle reader, you catch not the hicket with laughing. Imprinted at a place, not far from a place, by the assigns of Signior Somebody, and are to be sold at his shop in Troubleknave Street at the sign of the Standish.

The discussion of the characteristics of the actual tracts, as they present themselves and whosoever wrote them, is, on the other hand, entirely within our competence. On the whole the literary merit of the treatises has, I think, been overrated. The admirers of Martin have even gone so far as to traverse Penry's perfectly true statement that in using light, not to say ribald, treatment of a serious subject, he was only following [Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde and] other Protestant writers, and have attributed to him an almost entire originality of method, owing at most something to the popular "gags" of the actor Richard Tarleton, then recently dead. This is quite uncritical. An exceedingly free treatment of sacred and serious affairs had been characteristic of the Reformers from Luther downward, and the new Martin only introduced the variety of style which any writer of considerable talents is sure to show. His method, at any rate for a time, is no doubt sufficiently amusing, though it is hardly effective. Serious arguments are mixed up with the wildest buffoonery, and unconscious absurdities (such as a solemn charge against the unlucky Bishop Aylmer because he used the phrase "by my faith," and enjoyed a game at bowls) with the most venomous assertion or insinuation of really odious offences. The official answer to the Epistle and the Epitome has been praised by no less a person than Bacon for its gravity of tone. Unluckily Dr. Cooper was entirely destitute of the faculty of relieving argument with humour. He attacks the theology of the Martinists with learning and logic that leave nothing to desire; but unluckily he proceeds in precisely the same style to deal laboriously with the quips assigned by Martin to Mistress Margaret Lawson (a noted Puritan shrew of the day), and with mere idle things like the assertion that Whitgift "carried Dr. Perne's cloakbag." The result is that, as has been said, the rejoinder Hay any Work for Cooper shows Martin, at least at the beginning, at his very best. The artificial simplicity of his distortions of Cooper's really simple statements is not unworthy of Swift, or of the best of the more recent practitioners of the grave and polite kind of political irony. But this is at the beginning, and soon afterwards Martin relapses for the most part into the alternation between serious argument which will not hold water and grotesque buffoonery which has little to do with the matter. A passage from the Epistle lampooning Aylmer, Bishop of London, and a sample each of Pap with a Hatchet and the Almond, will show the general style. But the most characteristic pieces of all are generally too coarse and too irreverent to be quotable:--

In his Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England (Works. Folio, 1753, ii. p. 375).

"Well now to mine eloquence, for I can do it I tell you. Who made the porter of his gate a dumb minister? Dumb John of London. Who abuseth her Majesty's subjects, in urging them to subscribe contrary to law? John of London. Who abuseth the high commission, as much as any? John London (and D. Stanhope too). Who bound an Essex minister, in 200l. to wear the surplice on Easter Day last? John London. Who hath cut down the elms at Fulham? John London. Who is a carnal defender of the breach of the Sabbath in all the places of his abode? John London. Who forbiddeth men to humble themselves in fasting and prayer before the Lord, and then can say unto the preachers, now you were best to tell the people that we forbid fasts? John London. Who goeth to bowls upon the Sabbath? Dumb Dunstical John of good London hath done all this. I will for this time leave this figure, and tell your venerable masterdoms a tale worth the hearing: I had it at the second hand: if he that told it me added anything, I do not commend him, but I forgive him: The matter is this. A man dying in Fulham, made one of the Bishop of London's men his executor. The man had bequeathed certain legacies unto a poor shepherd in the town. The shepherd could get nothing of the Bishop's man, and therefore made his moan unto a gentleman of Fulham, that belongeth to the court of requests. The gentleman's name is M. Madox. The poor man's case came to be tried in the Court of Requests. The B. man desired his master's help: Dumb John wrote to the masters of requests to this effect, and I think these were his words:

"'My masters of the requests, the bearer hereof being my man, hath a cause before you: inasmuch as I understand how the matter standeth, I pray you let my man be discharged the court, and I will see an agreement made. Fare you well.' The letter came to M. D. Dale, he answered it in this sort:

"'My Lord of London, this man delivered your letter, I pray you give him his dinner on Christmas Day for his labour, and fare you well.'

"Dumb John not speeding this way, sent for the said M. Madox: he came, some rough words passed on both sides, Presbyter John said, Master Madox was very saucy, especially seeing he knew before whom he spake: namely, the Lord of Fulham. Whereunto the gentleman answered that he had been a poor freeholder in Fulham, before Don John came to be L. there, hoping also to be so, when he and all his brood (my Lady his daughter and all) should be gone. At the hearing of this speech, the wasp got my brother by the nose, which made him in his rage to affirm, that he would be L. of Fulham as long as he lived in despite of all England. Nay, soft there, quoth M. Madox, except her Majesty. I pray you, that is my meaning, call dumb John, and I tell thee Madox that thou art but a Jack to use me so: Master Madox replying, said that indeed his name was John, and if every John were a Jack, he was content to be a Jack (there he hit my L. over the thumbs). The B. growing in choler, said that Master Madox his name did shew what he was, for saith he, thy name is mad ox, which declareth thee to be an unruly and mad beast. M. Madox answered again, that the B. name, if it were descanted upon, did most significantly shew his qualities. For said he, you are called Elmar, but you may be better called marelm, for you have marred all the elms in Fulham: having cut them all down. This far is my worthy story, as worthy to be printed, as any part of Dean John's book, I am sure."

* * * * *

"To the Father and the two Sons, HUFF, RUFF, and SNUFF, the three tame ruffians of the Church, which take pepper in the nose, because they cannot mar Prelates: greeting.

"Room for a royster; so that's well said. Ach, a little farther for a good fellow. Now have at you all my gaffers of the railing religion, 'tis I that must take you a peg lower. I am sure you look for more work, you shall have wood enough to cleave, make your tongue the wedge, and your head the beetle. I'll make such a splinter run into your wits, as shall make them rankle till you become fools. Nay, if you shoot books like fools' bolts, I'll be so bold as to make your judgments quiver with my thunderbolts. If you mean to gather clouds in the Commonwealth, to threaten tempests, for your flakes of snow, we'll pay you with stones of hail; if with an easterly wind you bring caterpillers into the Church, with a northern wind we'll drive barrens into your wits.

"We care not for a Scottish mist, though it wet us to the skin, you shall be sure your cockscombs shall not be missed, but pierced to the skulls. I profess railing, and think it as good a cudgel for a martin, as a stone for a dog, or a whip for an ape, or poison for a rat.

"Yet find fault with no broad terms, for I have measured yours with mine, and I find yours broader just by the list. Say not my speeches are light, for I have weighed yours and mine, and I find yours lighter by twenty grains than the allowance. For number you exceed, for you have thirty ribald words for my one, and yet you bear a good spirit. I was loth so to write as I have done, but that I learned, that he that drinks with cutters, must not be without his ale daggers; nor he that buckles with Martin, without his lavish terms.

"Who would curry an ass with an ivory comb? Give the beast thistles for provender. I do but yet angle with a silken fly, to see whether martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I have worms for the nonce, and will give them line enough like a trout, till they swallow both hook and line, and then, Martin, beware your gills, for I'll make you dance at the pole's end.

"I know Martin will with a trice bestride my shoulders. Well, if he ride me, let the fool sit fast, for my wit is very hickish: which if he spur with his copper reply, when it bleeds, it will all to besmear their consciences.

"If a martin can play at chess, as well as his nephew the ape, he shall know what it is for a scaddle pawn to cross a Bishop in his own walk. Such diedappers must be taken up, else they'll not stick to check the king. Rip up my life, discipher my name, fill thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toad, hiss like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is prepared and my mind; and if ye chance to find any worse words than you brought, let them be put in your dad's dictionary. And so farewell, and be hanged, and I pray God ye fare no worse.

"Yours at an hour's warning,

"DOUBLE V."

Well-known stage characters in Preston's Cambyses.

* * * * *

"By this time I think, good-man Puritan, that thou art persuaded, that I know as well as thy own conscience thee, namely Martin Makebate of England, to be a most scurvy and beggarly benefactor to obedience, and per consequens, to fear neither men, nor that God Who can cast both body and soul into unquenchable fire. In which respect I neither account you of the Church, nor esteem of your blood, otherwise than the blood of Infidels. Talk as long as you will of the joys of heaven, or pains of hell, and turn from yourselves the terror of that judgment how you will, which shall bereave blushing iniquity of the fig-leaves of hypocrisy, yet will the eye of immortality discern of your painted pollutions, as the ever-living food of perdition. The humours of my eyes are the habitations of fountains, and the circumference of my heart the enclosure of fearful contrition, when I think how many souls at that moment shall carry the name of Martin on their foreheads to the vale of confusion, in whose innocent blood thou swimming to hell, shalt have the torments of ten thousand thousand sinners at once, inflicted upon thee. There will envy, malice, and dissimulation be ever calling for vengeance against thee, and incite whole legions of devils to thy deathless lamentation. Mercy will say unto thee, I know thee not, and Repentance, what have I to do with thee? All hopes shall shake the head at thee, and say: there goes the poison of purity, the perfection of impiety, the serpentine seducer of simplicity. Zeal herself will cry out upon thee, and curse the time that ever she was mashed by thy malice, who like a blind leader of the blind, sufferedst her to stumble at every step in Religion, and madest her seek in the dimness of her sight, to murder her mother the Church, from whose paps thou like an envious dog but yesterday pluckedst her. However, proud scorner, thy whorish impudency may happen hereafter to insist in the derision of these fearful denunciations, and sport thy jester's pen at the speech of my soul, yet take heed least despair be predominant in the day of thy death, and thou instead of calling for mercy to thy Jesus, repeat more oftener to thyself, Sic morior damnatus ut Judas! And thus much, Martin, in the way of compassion, have I spoke for thy edification, moved thereto by a brotherly commiseration, which if thou be not too desperate in thy devilish attempts, may reform thy heart to remorse, and thy pamphlets to some more profitable theme of repentance."

If Martin Marprelate is compared with the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum earlier, or the Satire Menippée very little later, the want of polish and directness about contemporary English satire will be strikingly apparent. At the same time he does not compare badly with his own antagonists. The divines like Cooper are, as has been said, too serious. The men of letters like Lyly and Nash are not nearly serious enough, though some exception may be made for Nash, especially if Pasquil's Apology be his. They out-Martin Martin himself in mere abusiveness, in deliberate quaintness of phrase, in fantastic vapourings and promises of the dreadful things that are going to be done to the enemy. They deal some shrewd hits at the glaring faults of their subject, his outrageous abuse of authorities, his profanity, his ribaldry, his irrelevance; but in point of the three last qualities there is not much to choose between him and them. One line of counter attack they did indeed hit upon, which was followed up for generations with no small success against the Nonconformists, and that is the charge of hypocritical abuse of the influence which the Nonconformist teachers early acquired over women. The germs of the unmatched passages to this effect in The Tale of a Tub may be found in the rough horseplay of Pap with a Hatchet and An Almond for a Parrot. But the spirit of the whole controversy is in fact a spirit of horseplay. Abuse takes the place of sarcasm, Rabelaisian luxuriance of words the place of the plain hard hitting, with no flourishes or capers, but with every blow given straight from the shoulder, which Dryden and Halifax, Swift and Bentley, were to introduce into English controversy a hundred years later. The peculiar exuberance of Elizabethan literature, evident in all its departments, is nowhere more evident than in this department of the prose pamphlet, and in no section of that department is it more evident than in the Tracts of the Martin Marprelate Controversy. Never perhaps were more wild and whirling words used about any exceedingly serious and highly technical matter of discussion; and probably most readers who have ventured into the midst of the tussle will sympathise with the adjuration of Plain Percivall the Peacemaker of England (supposed to be Richard Harvey, brother of Gabriel, who was himself not entirely free from suspicion of concernment in the matter), "My masters, that strive for this supernatural art of wrangling, let all be husht and quiet a-God's name." It is needless to say that the disputants did not comply with Plain Percivall's request. Indeed they bestowed some of their choicest abuse on him in return for his advice. Not even by the casting of the most peacemaking of all dust, that of years and the grave, can it be said that these jars at last compacta quiescunt. For it is difficult to find any account of the transaction which does not break out sooner or later into strong language.