 Introduction and Preface of A Brief History of English and American Literature. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Kalinda. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. With Introduction and Supplementary Chapters on the Religious and Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States by John Fletcher Hearst. Introduction. At the request of the publishers, the undersigned has prepared this introduction and two supplementary chapters on the Religious and Theological Literature of Great Britain and the United States. To the preacher in his preparation for the pulpit, and also to the general reader and student of religious history. The pursuit of the study of literature is a necessity. The sermon itself is a part of literature, must have its literary finish and proportions, and should give ample proof of a familiarity with the masterpieces of the English tongue. The world of letters presents to even the casual reader a rich and varied profusion of fascinating and luscious fruit. But to the earnest student who explores with thorough research and sympathetic mind the intellectual products of countries and times other than his own, the infinite variety so strikingly apparent to the superficial observer resolves itself into a beautiful and harmonious unity. Literature is the record of the struggles and aspirations of man in the boundless universe of thought. As in physics, the correlation and conservation of force bind all the material sciences together into one. So, in the world of the intellect, all the diverse departments of mental life and action find their common bond in literature. Even the signs and formulas of the mathematician and the chemist are but abbreviated forms of writing. The stenography of those exact sciences. The simple chronicles of the analysts, the flowing verses of the poet, clothing his thought with winged words, the abstruse propositions of the philosopher, the smiting protests of the bold reformer, either in church or state, the impassioned appeal of the advocate at the bar of justice, the argument of the legislator on behalf of his measures, the very cry of inarticulate pain of those who suffer under the oppression of cruelty, all have their literature. The minister of the gospel, whose mission is to man in his highest and holiest relations, must know the best that human thought has produced if he would successfully reach and influence the thoughtful and inquiring. Perhaps our best service here will be to suggest a method of pursuing a course of study in literature, both English and American. The following work of Professor Beers touches but lightly and scarcely more than opens these broad and inviting fields, which are ever-growing richer and more fascinating. While man continues to think he will weave the fabric of the mental loom into infinitely varied and beautiful designs. In the general outlines of a plan of literary study, which is to cover the entire history of English and American literature, the following directions it is hoped will be of value. 1. Fix the great landmarks, the general periods, each marked by some towering leader, around whom other contemporary writers may be grouped. In Great Britain, the several and successive periods might thus be well designated by such authors as Geoffrey Chaucer or John Wycliffe, Thomas Moore or Henry Howard, Edmund Spencer or Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare or Francis Bacon, John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, John Dryden or John Locke, Joseph Addison or Joseph Butler, Samuel Johnson or Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper or John Wesley, Walter Scott or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth or Thomas Chalmers, Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Carlisle or William Makepeace Thackeray. A similar list for American literature would place as leaders in letters, Thomas Hooker or Thomas Shepard, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Philip Fresno, Noah Webster or James Kent, James Fenimore Cooper or Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson or Edward Everett, Joseph Addison Alexander or William Ellery Channing, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell or Nathaniel Hawthorne. The prosecution of the study might be carried on in one or more of several ways, according either to the purpose and view or the tastes of the student. Attention might profitably be concentrated on the literature of a given period and worked out in detail by taking up individual authors or by classifying all the writers of the period on the basis of the character of their writing such as poetry, history, bell letter, theology, essays and the like. Again, the literature of a period might be studied with reference to its influence on the religious, commercial, political or social life of the people among whom it is circulated or as the result of certain forces which have preceded its production. It is well worth the time and effort to trace the influence of one author upon another or many others who, while maintaining their individuality, have been either in style or method of production unconsciously molded by their confrares of the pen. The divisions of writers may again be made with reference to their opinions and associations in the different departments of life where they have wrought their active labors such as in politics, religion, moral reform or educational questions. The influence of the great writers in the languages of the continent upon the literature of England and America affords another theme of absorbing interest and has its peculiarly good results in bringing the student into close brotherhood with the fruitful and cultured minds of every land. In fact, the possible applications of the study of literature are so many and varied that the ingenuity of any earnest student may devise such as the exigencies of his own work may require. John F. Hearst, Washington, Preface In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to get room enough to give not an adequate impression that is impossible, but any impression at all of the subject. To do this I have crowded out everything but bell-letra, books in philosophy, history, science, etc. However important in the history of English thought, received the merest incidental mention, or even no mention at all. Again, I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman to read as German is or Dutch. Cademon and Cinewolf are no more a part of English literature than Virgil and Horus are of Italian. I have also left out the vernacular literature of the Scotch before the time of Burns. At the date of the Union, Scotland was a separate kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the English, though parallel with it. In dividing the history into periods I have followed with some modifications, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brook in his excellent little primer of English literature. A short reading course is appended to each chapter. Henry A. Beers End of Introduction and Preface Part 1, Chapter 1 of A Brief History of English and American Literature This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colinda A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers Part 1, Chapter 1 From the Conquest to Chaucer 1066-1400 The Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature. The old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech with a complicated grammar and a full set of inflections. For 300 years following the Battle of Hastings, this native tongue was driven from the king's court and the courts of law from parliament, school, and university. During all this time there were two languages spoken in England. Norman French was the birth tongue of the upper classes and English of the lower. When the latter finally got the better in the struggle and became about the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all of England it was no longer the English of King Alfred. It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of its old words and had filled their places with French equivalents. The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms, the ladies and courtiers, words of dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase. The master builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living animals, ox, swine, sheep, deer, was left to the Saxon churl who had the herding of them while the dressed meats, beef, pork, mutton, venison, received their baptism from the table talk of his Norman master. The four orders of begging friars and especially the Franciscans or grey friars introduced into England in 1224 became intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching to the poor and in their sermons they intermingled French with English. In their hands too was almost all the science of the day. Their medicine, botany and astronomy displayed the old nomenclature of leechdom, wart-cunning and starcraft. And finally the translators of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the commonest words in everyday use so that voice drove out stiffen, poor drove out arm and colour, use and place made good their footing beside hue, want and stead. A great part of the English words that were left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new. Chaucer stands in date midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson but his English differs vastly more from the former's than from the latter's. To Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us. The classical Anglo-Saxon moreover had been the Wessex dialect spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture there was no longer a King's English or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge and the neighbouring Shires. Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language after the conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local dialect while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford and Cambridge became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote. The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of literature. They were cosmopolitan people and they connected England with the continent. Land Frank and Anselm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury were learned and splendid prelates of a type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris and the reformed discipline of the Norman Abbeys. They bound the English church more closely to Rome and officered it with Normans. English bishops were deprived of their seas for illiteracy and French habits were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and with one exception unimportant. After 1200 English came more and more into written use but mainly in translations, paraphrases and imitations of French works. The native genius was at school and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master. The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating. Resta hine tharum cheot resed thlifada cheap and gold fa gest ines vef. Rested him then the great-hearted, the hall-towered, roomy and gold-bright the guests slept within. This rude energetic verse, the Saxon shop, had sung to his harp or his glee-beam, dwelling on the emphatic syllables passing swiftly over the others which were of undetermined number and position in the line. It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a verse fitted to be recited rather than sung. The old English alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century but it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect and was doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority to the more modern verse system and his own literary models and inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his contemporaries but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule. The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Copies of these annals, differing somewhat among themselves, have been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester and elsewhere. The yearly entries were mostly brief, dry records of passing events though occasionally they became full and animated. The Fenn Country of Cambridge and Lincolnshire was a region of monasteries, here with the great abbeys of Peterborough and Croyland and Ellie Minster. One of the earliest English songs tells how the savage heart of the Danish king Knut was softened by the singing of the monks in Ellie. Mary sung Munichus benen Ellie. The Knut chennon reoth er by. Roveth knethis noa the land and herve this Munichus sang. It was among the dykes and marches of this Fenn Country that the bold outlaw Heravud, the last of the English, held out for some years against the conqueror. And it was here, in the rich abbey of Berch or Peterborough, the ancient Medis-Homstede, Meadow-Homestede, that the chronicle was continued for nearly a century after the conquest, breaking off abruptly in 1154, the date of King Stephen's death. Peterborough had received a new Norman Abbot to Rold, a very stern man. And the entry in the chronicle for 1170 tells how Heravud and his gang, with his Danish backers, thereupon plundered the abbey of its treasures, which were first removed to Ellie, and then carried off by the Danish fleet and sunk, lost, or squandered. The English in the later portions of this Peterborough chronicle becomes gradually more modern, and falls away more and more from the strict grammatical standards of the classic Anglo-Saxon. It is a most valuable historical document, and some passages of it are written with great vividness, notably the sketch of William the Conqueror put down in the year of his death, 1086, by one who had looked upon him and at another time dwelt in his court. He who was before a rich king and lord of many a land, he had not then of all his land but a piece of seven feet. Likewise, he was a very stark man and a terrible, so that one durst do nothing against his will. Among other things is not to be forgotten the good piece that he made in his land, so that a man might fare over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold unhurt. He set up a great deer preserve, and he laid laws therewith that whoso should slay heart or hind, he should be blinded. As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father. With the discontinuance of the Peterborough annals, English history written in English prose ceased for 300 years. The thread of the nation's story was kept up in Latin chronicles, compiled by writers partly of English and partly of Norman descent. The earliest of these, such as Ordericus Vitalis, Simeon of Durham, Henry of Huntington, and William of Malmesbury were contemporary with the later entries of the Saxon Chronicle. The last of them, Matthew of Westminster, finished his work in 1273. About 1300, a monk of Gloucester, composed a chronicle in English verse, following in the main the authority of the Latin chronicles, and he was succeeded by other rhyming chroniclers in the 14th century. In the hands of these, the true history of the Saxon times was overlaid with an ever-increasing mass of fable and legend. All real knowledge of the period dwindled away until in Capgrave's Chronicle of England, written in prose in 1463 to 64, hardly anything of it is left. In history, as in literature, the English had forgotten their past and had turned to foreign sources. It is noteworthy that Shakespeare, who borrowed his subjects and his heroes sometimes from the authentic English history, sometimes from the legendary history of ancient Britain, Denmark and Scotland, as in Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth, ignores the Saxon period altogether. And Spencer, who gives in his second book of the Fairy Queen a resume of the reigns of fabulous British kings, the supposed ancestors of Queen Elizabeth, his royal patron, has nothing to say of the real kings of early England. So completely had the true record faded away that it made no appeal to the imaginations of our most patriotic poets. The Saxon Alfred had been dethroned by the British Arthur and the conquered Welsh had imposed their fictitious genealogies upon the dynasty of the conquerors. In the Romain de Rue, a verse chronicle of the Dukes of Normandy, written by the Norman Waste, it is related that at the Battle of Hastings, the French jongleur, Tifer, spurred out before the van of William's army, tossing his lance in the air and chanting of Charlemagne and of Roland, of Oliver and the peers who died at Renceval. This incident is prophetic of the victory which Norman Song, no less than Norman Arms, was to win over England. The lines which Tifer sang were from the Chanson de Roland, the oldest and best of the French hero sagas. The heathen Northmen, who had ravaged the coasts of France in the 10th century, had become, in the course of 150 years, completely identified with the French. They had accepted Christianity, intermarried with the native women and forgotten their own Norse tongue. The race thus formed was the most brilliant in Europe. The warlike adventurous spirit of the Vikings mingled in its blood with the French nibbleness of wit and fondness for display. The Normans were a nation of knights errant, with a passion for prowess and for courtesy. Their architecture was at once strong and graceful. Their women were skilled in embroidery, a splendid sample of which is preserved in the famous Bayeux Tapestry, in which the conqueror's wife Matilda and the ladies of her court wrought the history of the conquest. This national taste for decoration expressed itself not only in the ceremonious pomp of feast and chase and tourney, but likewise in literature. The most characteristic contribution of the Normans to English poetry were the metrical romances or chivalry tales. These were sung or recited by the minstrels, who were among the retainers of every great feudal baron, or by the jongleurs, who wandered from court to castle. There is a whole literature of these romans d'aventure in the Anglo-Norman dialect of French. Many of them are very long, often 30, 40, or 50,000 lines, written sometimes in a strophic form, sometimes in long Alexandrons, but commonly in the short, eight-cellibald rhyming couplet. Numbers of them were turned into English verse in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries. The translations were usually inferior to the originals. The French trouvère, finder, or poet, told in his story in a straightforward prosaic fashion, omitting no details in the action and unrolling endless descriptions of dresses, trappings, gardens, etc. He invented plots and situations full of fine possibilities by which later poets have profited, but his own handling of them was feeble and prolex. Yet there was a simplicity about the old French language and a certain elegance and delicacy in the diction of the trouvère, which the rude, unformed English failed to catch. The heroes of these romances were of various climes. Guy of Warwick and Richard the Lionheart of England, Havilok the Dane, Sir Troilus of Troy, Charlemagne, and Alexander. But strangely enough, the favourite hero of English romance was that mythical Arthur of Britain, whom Welsh legend had celebrated as the most formidable enemy of the Sasanachin Veders and their victor in 12 great battles. The language and literature of the ancient Simr, or Welsh, had made no impression on their Anglo-Saxon conquerors. There were a few Welsh borrowings in the English speech, such as Bard and Druid. But in the old Anglo-Saxon literature, there are no more traces of British song and story than if the two races had been sundered by the ocean instead of being borderers for over 600 years. But the Welsh had their own national traditions and after the Norman conquest these were set free from the isolation of their Celtic tongue and in an indirect form entered into the general literature of Europe. The French came into contact with the old British literature in two places. In the Welsh marches in England and in the province of Brittany in France, where the population is of Simrac race and spoke, and still to some extent speaks, a Simrac dialect akin to the Welsh. About 1140, Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Benedict in Mont, seemingly of Welsh descent, born of Henry I and became afterward Bishop of St. Asaf, produced in Latin a so-called Historia Bretonum in which it was told how Brutus, the great grandson of Aeneas, came to Britain and founded there his kingdom called after him and his city of New Troy, Troy-Novant, on the site of the later London. An air of historic gravity was given to this tissue of Welsh legends by an exact chronology and the genealogy of the British kings and author referred as his authority to an imaginary Welsh book given him, as he said, by a certain Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. He appeared that line of fabulous British princes which has become so familiar to modern readers in the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Tennyson. Lear and his three daughters, Cymbeline, Gorbeduch, the subject of the earliest regular English tragedy, composed by Sackville and acted in 1562. Locreen and his queen, Gwendolyn, and his daughter, Sabrina, who gave her name to the river Severn, was made immortal by an exquisite song in Milton's commos and became the heroine of the tragedy of Locreen once attributed to Shakespeare and above all, Arthur, the son of Uther Pendragon and the founder of the Table Round. In 1155, Weiths, the author of the Romand de Roux, turns Geoffrey's work into a French poem entitled Brut d'Angleterre. Brut being a Welsh word meaning chronicle. About the year 1200, Weiths's poem was Englished by Leaman, a priest of Arlie Regis, on the border stream of Severn. Leaman's Brut is in 30,000 lines, partly alliterative and partly rhymed, but written in pure Saxon English with hardly any French words. The style is rude but vigorous and at times highly imaginative. Weiths had amplified Geoffrey's chronicle somewhat, but Leaman made much larger additions, derived no doubt from legends current on the Welsh border. In particular, the story of Arthur grew in his hands into something like fullness. He tells of the enchantments of Merlin, the wizard, of the unfaithfulness of Arthur's queen Guinevere and the treachery of his nephew Modrid. His narration of the last great battle between Arthur and Modrid, of the wounding of the king, 15 fiendly wounds he had, one might in the least three gloves thrust, and of the little boat with two women therein, wonderly-dite, which came to bear him away to Avalon and the queen Argante, sheenest of all elves, whence he shall come again, according to Merlin's prophecy, to rule the Britons. All this left little in essentials this new material for fiction was eagerly seized upon by the Norman Romancers. The story of Arthur drew to itself other stories which were afloat. Walter Mapp, a gentleman of the Court of Henry II in two French prose romances, connected with it the church legend of the Saint-Grayal, or Holy Cup, from which Christ had drunk at his last supper, and which Joseph of Arimathea had afterward brought to England. Then it miraculously disappeared and became thenceforth the occasion of nightly quest, the mystic symbol of the object of the soul's desire, an adventure only to be achieved by the maiden knight Galahad, the son of the great Lancelot, who in the romances had taken the place of Maudred in Geoffrey's history, as the paramour of Queen Guinevere. In like manner the love story of Tristan and Isolt was joined by other Romancers to the Arthur saga. This came probably from Brittany or Cornwall. Thus there grew up a great epic cycle of Arthurian romance, with a fixed shape and a unity and vitality which have prolonged it to our own day and rendered it capable of a deeper and more spiritual treatment and a more artistic handling by such modern English poets as Tennyson in his Idols of the King by Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, and many others. There were innumerable Arthur romances in prose and verse, in Anglo-Norman and continental French dialects, in English, in German, and in other tongues. But the final form which this saga took in medieval England was the prose Mort d'Artur of Sir Thomas Mallory, composed at the close of the 15th century. This was a digest of the earlier romances and as Tennyson's main authority. Beside the literature of the knight was the literature of the cloister. There is a considerable body of religious writing in early English consisting of homilies in prose and verse, books of devotion like the Ankren Rivle, Rule of Anchorises, 1225, the A-in bit of Inwet, Remorse of Conscience, 1340, both in prose, the Handelung Sinne, 1303, the Cursor Mundi, 1320, and the Prick of Conscience, 1340, in verse. Metrical renderings of the Psalter, the Padronoster, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, the Gospels for the day, such as the Ormulum or Book of Orm, 1205, Legends and Miracles of Saints, poems in praise of virginity on the contempt of the world, on the five joys of the Virgin, the five wounds of Christ, the eleven pains of Hell, the seven deadly sins, the fifteen tokens of the coming judgment, and dialogues between the soul and the body. These were the work not only of the monks, but also of the begging friars, and in smaller part of the secular or parish clergy. They are full of the ascetic piety and superstition of the middle age, the childish belief in the marvelous, the allegorical interpretation of the scripture texts, the grotesque material horrors of Hell with its grisly fiends, the vileness of the human body, and the loathsome details of its corruption after death. Now and then, a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse. A poem so distinguished, for example, a Louvarran, a love council, by the minorite friar, Thomas de Hales, one stanza of which recalls the French poet Villon's ballad of dead ladies with its refrain, Mais où sont les neiges d'un temps? Where are the snows of yesteryear? Where is Paris and Elen so bright and fair of ble, Amadas, Tristan and Édain, Isard and Aladé, Hector with his sharper mind, and Caesar rich in world's fey? They both be glidden out of the rain as the shaft is of the day. A few early English poems on secular subjects are also worthy of mention, among others the Owl and the Nightingale, generally assigned to the reign of Henry III, from 16 to 1272, an estrif, or dispute, in which the Owl represents the ascetic and the Nightingale the aesthetic view of life. The debate is conducted with much animation and a spirited use of proverbial wisdom. The land of Coquenae is an amusing little poem of some 200 lines belonging to the class of Fabléo, short humorous tales or satirical pieces in verse. It describes a lubber land or fool's paradise where geese fly down all roasted on the spit, bringing garlic in the bills for the dressing, and where there is a nunnery upon a river of sweet milk, and an abbey of white monks and gray, whose walls like the Hall of Little King Pepin, are of pie crust and pastry crust, with flora and cakes for the shingles and fat puddings for the pins. There are a few songs dating from about 1300, and mostly found in a single collection, which are almost the only English verse before Chaucer that has any sweetness to a modern ear. They are written in French Strophic forms in the Southern dialect and sometimes have an intermixture of French and Latin lines. They are musical, fresh, simple, and many of them are very pretty. They celebrate the gladness of spring with its cuckoos and throttle cocks, its daisies and woodruff. When the Nightingale sings the wood's wax and green, leaf and grass and blossoms spring in Everlyween. And love is to be my heart gone with a spear so keen, night and day, my blood drinks my heart to doth me teen. Others are love-plants to Allison, or some other lady whose name is in a note of the Nightingale, whose eyes are as gray as glass and her skin as red as rose on wrists. Some employ a burden or refrain, blow northern wind, blow thou me my sweeting, blow northern wind, blow, blow, blow. Others are touched with a light melancholy at the coming of winter. Winter wakeneth all my care, now these leave is waxeth bare. Oft I sigh and mourn as air, when it cometh in my thought of this world's joy how it goeth all to naught. Some of these poems are love songs to Christ or the Virgin, composed in the warm language of earthly passion. The sentiment of chivalry united with the ecstatic reveries of the cloister had produced marioletry and the imagery of the song of Solomon in which Christ woozed the soul and made this feeling of divine love familiar. Toward the end of the 13th century, a collection of Lives of Saints, a sort of English golden legend, was prepared at the great Abbey of Gloucester for use on saint's days. The legends were chosen partly from the hagiology of the Church Catholic as the Lives of Margaret, Christopher and Michael, partly from the calendar of the English Church as the Lives of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, of the Anglo-Saxons, Dunstan, Swithin, who was mentioned by Shakespeare, and Kennelm, whose life is quoted by Chaucer in the non-apristoes tale. The verse was clumsy and the style monotonous, but an imaginative touch here and there has furnished a hint to later poets. Thus, the legend of Saint Brandon's search for the earthly paradise has been treated by Matthew Arnold and William Morris. About the middle of the 14th century, there was a revival of the old English alliterative verse in romances like William and the Werewolf and Sir Gawain, and in religious pieces such as Cleanness, Purity, Patience, and the Pearl, the last named a mystical poem of much beauty in which a bereaved father sees a vision of his daughter among the glorified. Some of these employed rhyme as well as the alliteration. They are in the West Midland dialect, although Chaucer implies that alliteration was most common in the north. I am a southern man, says the parson in the Canterbury Tales. I cannot just roam ram-roof by my letter. But the most important of the alliterative poems was the vision of William conquering Pierce the Ploughan. In the second half of the 14th century, French had ceased to be the mother tongue of any considerable part of the population of England. In the statute of Edward III in 1362, it was displaced from the law courts. By 1386, English had taken its place in the schools. The Anglo-Norman dialect had grown corrupt, and Chaucer contrasts the French of Paris with the provincial French spoken by his prioresse after the skull of Stratford at Bow. The native English genius was also beginning to assert itself, roused in part perhaps by the English victories and the wars of Edward III against the French. It was the bows of the English Yeomanry that won the fight at Crécy, fully as much as the prowess of the Norman Baronage. But at home the times were bad. Heavy taxes and the repeated visitations of the pestilence or black death pressed upon the poor and wasted the land. The church was corrupt, the mendicant orders had grown enormously wealthy, and the country was eaten up by a swarm of begging friars, partners, and apparatus. The social discontent was fermenting among the lower classes, which finally issued in the communistic uprising of the peasantry under Watt-Tiler and Jack Straw. This state of things is reflected in the vision of Piers Plowman, written as early as 1362 by William Langland, a tonsured clerk of the West Country. It is in form of an allegory and bears some resemblance to the later and more famous allegory of the pilgrim's progress. The poet falls asleep on the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, and has a vision of a fair field full of folk, representing the world with its various conditions of man. There were pilgrims and polymers, hermits with hooked staves who went to Walsingham, and their wenches after them, great lovers and long that were loft to work, friars glossing the gospel for their own profit, partners cheating the people with relics and indulgences, parish priests who forsook their parishes had been poor since the pestilence time, and went to London to sing there for symony, bishops, archbishops and deacons who got themselves fat clerkships in the Exchequer or King's Bench. In short, all manner of lazy and corrupt ecclesiastics. A lady who represents Holy Church then appears to the dreamer explaining to him the meaning of his vision and reads to him a sermon, the text of which is, when all treasure is tried, truth is the best. A number of other allegorical figures are next introduced, conscience, reason, mead, symony, falsehood, etc. and after a series of speeches and adventures, a second vision begins in which the seven deadly sins pass before the poet in a succession of graphic impersonations, and finally all the characters set out on a pilgrimage in search of saint truth, finding no guide to direct them save Pierce the Plowman as the sole pious, laboring man, the sound heart of the English common folk. The poem was originally in eight divisions or passes to which was added a continuation in three parts, Vite de Velle, de Bête and de Best. About 1377 the whole was greatly enlarged by the author. Pierce Plowman was the first in extended literary work after the conquest which was purely English in character. There was nothing to france but the allegorical cast which the Romains de la Rose had made fashionable in both countries. But even here such personified abstractions as Langland's fair speech and work when time is remind us less of the franchise, belle amour, and fal semblant of the French courtly allegories than of Bunyan's Mr. Worldly Wiseman. And even of such Puritan names as Praise God, Bear Bones and Zeal of the Land Busy. The poem is full of English moral seriousness of shrewd humor, the hatred of a lie the homely English love for reality. It has little unity of plan, but is rather a series of episodes, discourses, parables and scenes. It is all a stir with the actual life of the time. We see the gossips gathered in the alehouse of Bête in the Brewster and the pastry cooks in the London streets crying hot pies, hot good geese and grease. Go we dine, go we. Had Langland not linked his literary fortunes with an uncouth and obsolescent verse, and had he possessed a finer artistic sense and a higher poetic imagination, his book might have been like chossers among the lasting glories of our tongue. As it is, it is forgotten by all but professional students of literature and history. Its popularity in its own day is shown by the number of manuscripts which are extant and imitations such as Pierce the Ploughman's Creed, 1394 and the Ploughman's Tale for a long time wrongly inserted in the Canterbury Tales. Pierce became a kind of typical figure like the French peasant Jacques Bonhomme and was appealed to as such by the Protestant reformers of the 16th century. The attack upon the growing corruptions of the church was made more systematically and from the standpoint of a theologian rather than of a popular moralist and satirist by John Wycliffe, the rector of Lutterworth and Professor of Divinity in Balliol College, Oxford. In a series of Latin and English tracts he made war against indulgences, pilgrimages, images, oblations, the friars, the pope and the doctrine of transubstantiation. But his greatest service to England was his translation of the Bible, the first complete version in the mother tongue. This he made about 1380 with the help of Nicholas Hereford and a revision of it was made by another disciple, Pervy, some 10 years later. There was no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek in England at that time and the Wycliffe fight versions were made not from the original tongues but from the Latin Vulgate. In his anxiety to make his rendering close and mindful perhaps of the warning in the apocalypse if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy God shall take away his part out of the book of life. In the book of this prophecy as to make rather awkward English translating for example quid cibi volt hoxomnium by what to itself woldest sveven Pervy's version was somewhat freer and more idiomatic. In the reigns of Henry IV and V it was forbidden to read or to have any of Wycliffe's writings. Such of them as could be seized were publicly burned. In spite of this copies of his Bible circulated secretly in great numbers. Vorschal and Madden in their great edition 1850 enumerate 150 manuscripts which had been consulted by them. Later translators like Tyndale and the makers of the authorized version or King James Bible 1611 followed Wycliffe's language in many instances so that he was in truth the first author of our biblical dialect and the founder of that great monument of noble English which has been the main conservative influence in the mother tongue holding it fast to many strong pithy words and idioms that would else have been lost. In 1415 some 30 years after Wycliffe's death by decree of the Council of Constance his bones were dug up from the soil of Letterworth Chancell and burned and the ashes cast into the swift. The brook says Thomas Fuller in his church history did convey his ashes into Avon Avon into Severn Severn into the narrow seas of the main ocean and thus the ashes of Wycliffe are the emblem of his doctrine which now is dispersed all the world over. Although the writings thus far mentioned are of very high interest to the student of the English language and the historian of English manners and culture they cannot be said to have much importance as mere literature. But in Geoffrey Chaucer, died 1400, we meet with a poet of the first rank whose works are increasingly read and will always continue to be a source of delight to the general reader as well as a well of English undefiled to the professional man of letters. With the exception of Dante Chaucer was the greatest of the poets of medieval Europe and he remains one of the greatest of English poets and certainly the foremost of English storytellers in verse. He was the son of a London vintner and was in his youth in the service of Lionel Duke of Clarence, one of the sons of Edward III. He made a campaign in France to 60 when he was taken prisoner. Afterward he was attached to the court and received numerous favors and appointments. He was sent on several diplomatic missions by the king, three of them to Italy, where in all probability he made the acquaintance of the new Italian literature, the writings of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio. He was appointed at different times Comptroller of the Wool Customs, Comptroller of Petticustoms and Clerk of the Works. He sat for Kent in Parliament and he received pensions from three successive kings. He was a man of business as well as books and he loved man and nature no less than study. He knew his world. He saw life steadily and saw it whole. Living at the centre of English social and political life and resorting to the court of Edward III, then the most brilliant in Europe Chaucer was an eyewitness of those feudal pomps which filled the high-coloured pages of his contemporary, the French chronicler Françard. His description of a tournament in the night's tale is unaccelled for spirit and detail. He was familiar with dances, feasts and state ceremonies and all the life of the baronial castle in Bauer and Hall, the trumps with the loud minstrelsy, the heralds, the ladies and the squires, what hawks sitting on the perch above what hounds ligging on the floor down. But his sympathy reached no less the life of the lowly, the poor widow in her narrow cottage, and the true sphinker and a good, the plowman whom Langlin had made the hero of his vision. He is, more than all English poets, the poet of the lusty spring, of April with her shower's sweet and of the foulest song, of May with all her flowers and her green, of the new leaves in the wood, and the meadows new-powdered with the daisy, the mystic marguerite of his legend of love. A fresh, vernal air blows through all his pages. In Chaucer's earlier work, such as the translation of the Romant of the Rose, if that be his, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowles, the House of Fame, as well as in the Legend of Good Women which was later, the inspiration of the French court poetry of the 13th and 14th centuries is manifest. He retains in them the medieval machinery of allegories and dreams, the elaborate descriptions of palaces, temples, portraitures, etc. which had been made fashionable in France by such poems as Guillaume de Loras's Romant de la Rose and Jean Marchaud's La Fontaine Amoreuse. In some of these, the influence of Italian poetry is also perceptible. There are suggestions from Dante, for example, in the Parliament of Fowles and the House of Fame and Troilus and Cressida is a free handling rather than a translation of Facaccio's Filostrato. In all of these, there are passages of great beauty and force. Had Chaucer written nothing else, he would still have been remembered as the most accomplished English poet of his time, but he would not have risen to the rank which he now occupies, as one of the greatest English poets of all time. This position he owes to his masterpiece, the Canterbury Tales. Here he abandoned the invitation of foreign models and the artificial literary fashions of his age and wrote of real life his own ripe knowledge of men and things. The Canterbury Tales are a collection of stories written at different times but put together probably toward the close of his life. The framework into which they are fitted is one of the happiest ever devised. A number of pilgrims who are going on horseback to the Shrine of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury meet at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a suburb of London. The jolly host of the Tabard, Harry Bailey, proposes that on their way to Canterbury each of the company shall tell two tales and two more on their way back and that the one who tells the best shall have a supper at the cost of the rest when they return to the inn. He himself accompanies them as judge and reporter. In the setting of the stories there is thus a constant feeling of movement and the air of all outdoors. The little headlinks and endlinks which bind them together give incidents of the journey and glimpses of the talk of the pilgrims, sometimes amounting, as in the prologue of the wife of Bath, to full and almost dramatic character sketches. The stories, too, are dramatically suited to the narrators. The general prologue is a series of such character sketches, the most perfect in English poetry. The portraits of the pilgrims are illuminated with the soft brilliancy and the minute loving fidelity of the miniatures in the old missiles and with the same quaint precision and costume. The pilgrims are not all such as one would meet nowadays at an English inn. The presence of a knight, a squire, a yeoman archer, and especially of so many kinds of ecclesiastics, a nun, a friar, a monk, a partner, and a sampnur or a pareter, reminds us that the England of that day must have been less like Protestant England as we know it, than like the Italy of some 30 years ago. But however the outward face of society may have changed, the Canterbury pilgrims remain in Chaucer's description, living and universal types of human nature. The Canterbury tales are 24 in number. There were 32 pilgrims, so that if finished as designed, the whole collection would have numbered 128 stories. Chaucer is the bright consummate flower of the English middle age. Like many another great poet, he put the final touch to the various literary forms that he found in cultivation. Thus, his night's tale, based on Boccaccio's Teseide, is the best of English medieval romances. And yet the rhyme of Sir Thopus who goes seeking an elf queen for his mate, and is encountered by this giant Sir Oliphant, burlesques these same romances with their impossible adventures and their tedious rambling descriptions. The tales of the prioresse and the second nun are saints' legends, the monk's tale as a set of dry, moral apologs in the manner of his role-gower. The stories told by the Reeve, Miller, Friar, Sampnur, Shipman and Merchant belong to the class of Fablieux, a few of which existed in English such as Dame Cérise, the lay of the ash, and the land of Coquena already mentioned. The nun priest's tale, likewise, which dried and modernized with admirable humor, was of the class of Fablieux, and was suggested by a little poem in 40 lines du coq et verpille by Marie de France, a Norman poetess of the 13th century. It belonged, like the early English poem of the fox and the wolf, to the popular animal saga of Reynard the Fox. The Franklin's tale, who's seen as Brittany and the wife of Bath's tale, which is laid in the time of the British Arthur, belonged to the class of French lay, serious metrical tales shorter than the romance and of Breton origin. The best representatives of which was the elegant and graceful laze of Marie de France. Chaucer was our first great master of laughter and of tears. His serious poetry is full of the tenderest pathos. His loosest tales are delightfully humorous and lifelike. He is the kind laze of satirists. The navery, greed and hypocrisy of the begging friars and the sellers of indulgences are exposed by him as pitilessly as by Langland and Wycliffe, though his mood is not like theirs, one of stern moral action, but rather the good-natured scorn of a man of the world. His charity is broad enough to cover even the corrupt sompner of whom he says, and yet in sooth he was a good fellow. Whether he shared Wycliffe's opinions is unknown, but John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and father of Henry IV, who was Chaucer's lifelong patron, was likewise Wycliffe's great upholder against the persecution of the bishops. It is perhaps not without significance that the poor parson in the Canterbury Tales, the only one of his ecclesiastical pilgrims whom Chaucer treats with respect, is suspected by the host of the tabard to be a lullar, that is a lullard or disciple of Wycliffe, and that because he objects to the jovial innkeeper swearing by God's bones. Chaucer's English is nearly as easy for a modern reader as Shakespeare's, and few of his words have become obsolete. His verse, when rightly read, is direct and melodious. The early English was in some respects more sweet upon the tongue than the modern language. The vowels had their broad Italian sounds, and the speech was full of soft gutterls and vocalex syllables, like the endings in In, Is, and A, which made feminine rhymes and kept the consonants from coming harshly together. Great poet as Chaucer was, he was not quite free from the literary weakness of his time. He relapses sometimes into the babbling style of the old chroniclers and legend writers, cites octores, and gives long catalogs of names and objects with a naive display of learning, and introduces vulgar details in his most exquisite passages. There is something childish about almost all the thought and art of the Middle Ages, at least outside of Italy, where classical models and traditions never quite lost their hold. But Chaucer's artlessness is half the secret of his wonderful ease in storytelling, and is so engaging that, like a child's sweet unconsciousness, one would not wish it otherwise. The Canterbury Tales had shown of what high uses the English language was capable, but the curiously trilingual condition of literature still continued. French was spoken in the proceedings of Parliament as late as the reign of Henry VI, 1422 to 1471. Chaucer's contemporary, John Gower, wrote his Vox Clamantes in Latin, his Speculum Meditantes, a lost poem and a number of ballads in Parisian French, and his Confessio Amantes, 1393 in English. The last named is a dreary pedantic work in some 15,000 smooth, monotonous eight-syllable couplets in which Grande Amour instructs the lover how to get the love of Belle Bousselle. End of Part 1, Chapter 1 Part 1, Chapter 2 of a Brief History of English and American Literature. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Recording by Colinda. A Brief History of English and American Literature by Henry A. Beers. Part 1, Chapter 2 From Chaucer to Spencer 1400 to 1599. The 15th century was a barren period in English literary history. It was nearly 200 years after Chaucer's death before any poet came whose name can be written in the same line with his. He was followed at once by a number of imitators who caught the trick of his language in verse but lacked the genius to make any fine use of them. The manner of a true poet may be learned, but his style in the high sense of the word remains his own secret. Some of the poems which have been attributed to Chaucer and printed in editions of his works as The Court of Love, The Flower and the Leaf, The Cuckoo and the Nightingale, were regarded by many scholars as the work of later writers. If not Chaucer's they are of Chaucer's school, and the first two at least are very pretty poems after the fashion of his minor pieces such as the Book of the Duchess and the Parliament of Fowles. Among his professed disciples was Thomas Ocleve, a dull rhymeer who in his Governail of Princes, a didactic poem translated from the Latin about 1413, drew or caused to be drawn on the margin of his manuscript a colored portrait of his master-deer and father-reverent. This laundiced, very treasurer and richesse, death by thy death hath harm irreparable unto us done, her vengeable duress dispoiled hath this land of the sweetness of rhetoric. Another versifier of this same generation was John Lidgate, a Benedictine monk of the abbey of Burie St. Edmonds in Suffolk, a very Prolex writer who composed, among other things, the story of Thebes as an addition to the Canterbury Tales. His ballad of London lick-penny, recounting the adventures of a countryman who goes to the law courts at Westminster in search of justice, but for lack of money I could not speed, is of interest for the glimpse that it gives us of London's street life. Chaucer's influence wrought more fruitfully in Scotland, whether it was carried by James I, who had been captured by the English when a boy of eleven, and brought up at Windsor as a prisoner of state. There he wrote, during the reign of Henry V, 1413 to 1422, a poem in six cantos entitled The King's Cougar, King's Book. In Chaucer's Seven-Line Stanza, which had been employed by Lidgate in his Falls of Princes from Boccaccio, and which was afterward called The Reem Royale for its use by King James. The King's Cougar tells how the poet on a May morning looks from the window of his prison chamber into the castle garden full of alleys, hawthorn hedges and fair arbors set with the sharp green sweet juniper. He was listening to the little sweet nightingale, when suddenly, casting down his eyes, he saw a lady walking in the garden, and at once his heart became her thrall. The incident is precisely like Palamon's first sighting of Emily in Chaucer's Night's Tale, and almost in the very words of Palamon the poet addresses his lady, Ah, sweet, are you a worldly creature or heavenly thing in likeness of nature? Or are ye very nature the goddess that hath to painted with your heavenly hand this garden full of flowers as they stand? Then, after a vision in the taste of the age in which the royal prisoners transported in turn to the courts of Venus, Minerva and Fortune, and receives their instructions in the duties belonging to love service, he wakes from sleep, and a white turtle dove brings to his window a spray of red ghillie flowers, whose leaves are inscribed in golden letters with a message of encouragement. James I may be reckoned among the English poets. He mentions Chaucer, Gower and Lidgate as his masters. His education was English and so was the dialect of his poem, although the unique manuscript of it is in the Scotch spelling. The King's Cougar is somewhat overladen with ornament and with the fashionable allegorical devices, but it is upon the whole a rich and tender love song, the best specimen of court poetry between the time of Chaucer and the time of Spencer. The lady who walked in the garden on that May morning was Jane Beaufort, Henry IV. She was married to her poet after his release from captivity and became Queen of Scotland in 1424. Twelve years later, James was murdered by Sir Robert Graham and his Highlanders and his wife, who strove to defend him, was wounded by the assassins. The story of the murder has been told of late by D. G. Rossetti in his ballad, The King's Tragedy. The whole life of this princely singer was, like his poem, in the very spirit of romance. The effect of all this imitation of Chaucer was to fix a standard of literary style and to confirm the authority of the East Midland English in which he had written. Though the poets of the 15th century were not overburdened with genius, they had at least a definite model to follow. As in the 14th century, metrical romances continued to be translated from the French. Homilies and saints, legends, and rhyming chronicles were still manufactured, but the poems of Ocleve and Lidgate at first had helped to polish and refine the tongue and to prolong the Chaucerian tradition. The literary English never again slipped back into the chaos of dialects which had prevailed before Chaucer. In the history of every literature, the development of prose is later than that of verse. The latter, being by its very form artificial, is cultivated as a fine art, and its records preserved in an early stage of society when prose is simply the talk of men and women. English prose labored under the added disadvantage of competing with Latin, which was the cosmopolitan tongue and the medium of communication between scholars of all countries. Latin was the language of the church, and in the Middle Ages churchmen and scholar were convertible terms. The word clerk meant either priest or scholar. Two of the Canterbury tales are in prose, as is also the Testament of Love, formerly ascribed to Chaucer, as a feeble, wandering and unformed that it is hard to believe that they were written by the same man who wrote the Night's Tale and the story of Griselda. The voyage and travail of Sir John Mondeville, the forerunner of that great library of Oriental travel which has enriched our modern literature, was written according to its author, first in Latin, then in French, and lastly, in the year 1356, translated into English for the behoof of lords and knights and other noble men that cannot Latin but little. The author professed to have spent over 30 years in eastern travel, to have penetrated as far as farther India and the aisles that been about in India, to have been in the service of the Sultan of Babylon in his wars against the Bedouins and at another time in the employ of the great Khan of Tartary. But there is no copy of the Latin version of his travels extant. The French seems to be much later than 1356 and the English manuscript to belong to the early years of the 15th century and to have been made by another hand. Recent investigations make it probable that Mondeville borrowed his descriptions of the Remotor East from many sources and particularly from the narrative of Odorek, a minorate friar of Lombardi who wrote about 1330. Some doubt is even cast upon the existence of any such person as Mondeville. Whoever wrote the book that passes under his name, however, would seem to have no comment, and the part of the voyage that describes Palestine and the Levant is fairly close to the truth. The rest of the work, so far as it is not taken from the tales of other travelers, is a diverting tissue of fables about griffins that fly away with yolks of oxen, tribes of one-legged Ethiopians who shelter themselves from the sun by using their monstrous feet as umbrellas, etc. During the 15th century, English prose was gradually being brought into a shape fitting it for more languages. In the controversy between the church and the law lards, Latin was still mainly employed, but Wycliffe had written some of his tracts in English, and in 1449 Reginald Peacock, Bishop of St. Asif, contributed in English to the same controversy, the repressor of over much blaming of the clergy. Sir John Fortescue, who was Chief Justice of the King's Bench from 1442 to 1460, wrote during the reign of Edward IV, a book on the difference between absolute and limited monarchy, which may be regarded as the first treatise on political philosophy and constitutional law in that language. But these works hardly belong to pure literature, and are remarkable only as early, though not very good, examples of English prose in a barren time. The 15th century was an era of decay and change. The middle age was dying, church and state were slowly disintegrating under the new intellectual influences being secretly underground. In England the civil wars of the red and white roses were breaking up the old feudal society by decimating and impoverishing the barrenage, thus preparing the way for the centralized monarchy of the tutors. Toward the close of that century and early in the next happened the four great events, or series of events, which freed and widened men's minds, and in a succession of shocks overthrew the medieval system of life and thought. The invention of printing, the renaissance or revival of classical learning, the discovery of America, and the Protestant Reformation. William Caxton, the first English printer, learned the art in Cologne. In 1476 he set up his press and sign, a red pole, in the Almondry at Westminster. Just before the introduction of printing the demand for manning script copies had grown very active, stimulated perhaps by the coming into general use of manning paper instead of the more costly parchment. The scriptoria of the monasteries were the places where the transcribing and illuminating of manuscripts went on. Professional copyists resorting to Westminster Abbey, for example, to make their copies of books belonging to the monastic library. Caxton's choice of a spot was therefore significant. His new art for multiplying copies began to supersede the old method of transcription at the very headquarters . The first book that bears his Westminster imprint was the dictus and sayings of the philosophers, translated from the French by Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers, a brother-in-law of Edward IV. The list of books printed by Caxton is interesting as showing the taste of the time as he naturally selected what was most in demand. The list shows that manuals of devotion and chivalry were still in chief request, books like the Order of Chivalry, Fates of Arms, and the Golden Legend, which last Caxton translated himself, as well as Reynard the Fox and a French version of the Aeneid. He also printed with continuations of his own, revisions of several early chronicles and editions of Chaucer, Gower and Lidgate. A translation of Cicero on Friendship made directly from the Latin by Thomas Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, was printed by Caxton but no edition of a classical author in the original. The new learning of the Renaissance had not as yet taken much hold in England. Upon the whole, the productions of Caxton's press were mostly of a kind that may be described as medieval, and the most important of them, if we accept his edition of Chaucer, was that noble and joyous book, as Caxton called it, Le Morte d'Artur, written by Sir Thomas Mallory in 1469 and printed by Caxton in 1485. This was a compilation from French Arthur romances, and was by far the best English prose that had yet been written. It may be doubted indeed whether for purposes of simple storytelling, the picturesque charm of Mallory's style has been improved upon. The episode which lends its name to the whole romance, the death of Arthur, is most impressively told, and Tennyson has followed Mallory's narrative closely, even to such details of the scene as the little chapel by the sea, the moonlight and the answer which Sir Edward made the wounded king when bitten to throw Excalibur into the water. What saw thou there? said the king. Sir, he said, I saw nothing but the water's whop and the wave's wand. I heard the ripple washing in the reeds and the wild water lapping on the crag. And very touching and beautiful is the oft-quoted lament of Sir Ector over Lancelot in Mallory's final chapter. Ah Lancelot, he said, thou were head of all Christian knights, I dare say, said Sir Ector. Thou, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight's hand, and thou were the courteous knight that ever bear a shield, and thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestowed horse, and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman, and thou were the kindest man that ever strake with sword, and thou were the goodliest person ever came among press of knights, and thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever in the eighties, and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest. Equally good as an example of English prose narrative was the translation made by John Borshire, Lord Burners, of that most brilliant of the French chroniclers, Chaucer's Contemporary, Sir John Foissard. Lord Burners was the English Governor of Calais, and his version of Foissard's Chronicles was made in 1523 to 25 at the request of Henry VIII. In these two books, English chivalry spoke its last, genuine word. In Sir Philip's Sydney, the character of the knight was merged into that of the modern gentleman, and although tournaments were still held in the reign of Elizabeth, and Spencer cast his fairy queen into the form of a chivalry romance, these were but a ceremonial survival and literary tradition from an order of things that had passed away. How antagonistic the new classical culture was to the vanished ideal of the middle age may be soxophilus, a treatise on archery published in 1545 by Roger Asham, a Greek lecturer in Cambridge, and the tutor of the Princess Elizabeth and Lady Jane Gray. In our forefathers time, when Papestry as a standing pool covered and overflowed all England, few books were read in our tongue saving certain books of chivalry, as they said, for pastime and pleasure, which as some say were made in monasteries by idle monks or wanton cannons, one, for example, Mort Artour, the whole pleasure of which books stand within two special points, an open manslaughter and bold bodry. This is good stuff for wise men to laugh at or honest men to take pleasure at, yet I know when God's Bible was banished the court and Mort Artour received into the Prince's chamber. The fashionable school of courtly allegory, first introduced into England by the translation of the Roman of the Rose, reached its extremity in Stephen Hawes' pastime of pleasure, printed by Caxon Successor, winked into word in 1517. This was a dreary and pedantic poem in which it is told how ground on more, after a long series of adventures and instructions among such shadowy personages as verite, observance, falsehood, and good operation, finally won the love of Label Poussel. Hawes was the last English poet of note whose culture was exclusively dull. His contemporary, John Skelton, mingled the old fashions with the new classical learning. In his Bowge of court, court entertainment or dull, and in others of his earlier pieces, he used, like Hawes, Chaucer's seven line stanza. But his later poems were mostly written in a verse of his own invention, called after him skeltonical. This was a sort of glorified doggerel in short, swift, ragged lines with occasional intermixture of French words. Her beauty to augment, dame nature hath her lent, a wart upon her cheek, who so list to seek in her visage a scar, that Seymouth from afar, like to the radiant star, all with favor fret, so properly it is set. She is the violet, the daisy delectable, the Columbine commendable, the gelapher amiable. For this most goodly flower this blossom of fresh color, so Jupiter, me, sucker, she flourisheth new and new in beauty and virtue. Skelton was a rude, railing rhymer, and a singular mixture of a true and original poet with a buffoon, coarse as rabble, whimsical obscure, but always vivacious. He was the rector of dis in Norfolk, but his profane and scurrilous wit seems rather out of keeping with his clerical character. His tonning of Eleanor Rumming is a study of very low life, reminding one slightly of Burns's jolly beggars. His Philip Sparrow is a sportive pretty fantastic elegy on the death of a pet bird belonging to mistress Joanna Scroop of Carrow, and has been compared to the Latin poet Catellus' elegy on Lesbias Sparrow. In Speak, Parrot, and Why Come Ye Not to Court, he assailed the powerful Cardinal Wolsey with the most ferocious satire, and was in consequence obliged to take sanctuary at the door, where he died in 1529. Skeleton was a classical scholar, and at one time tutor to Henry VIII. The great humanist Erasmus spoke of him as the one light and ornament of British letters. Caxton asserts that he had read Virgil, Ovid, and Tully, and quaintly adds, I suppose he hath drunken of Elisande's well. In refreshing contrast with the artificial court poetry of the 15th and the first three quarters of the 16th century, was the folk poetry, the popular ballad literature which was handed down by oral tradition. The English and Scotch ballads were narrative songs written in a variety of meters, but chiefly in what is known as the ballad stanza. In Summer, when the shaws be shamed and leaves be large and long, it is full merrian fair forest to hear the foulest song, to see the deer draw to the dale and leave the hillies he, and shadow them in the leaves under the greenwood tree. It is not possible to assign a definite date to these ballads, they lived in the lips of the people and were seldom reduced to writing till many years after they were first composed and sung. Meanwhile, they underwent repeated changes so that we have numerous versions of the same story. They belonged to no particular author but like all folklore, were handed freely by the unknown poets, minstrels and ballad reciters who modernized their language, added to them and passed them along. Coming out of an uncertain past, based on some dark legend of heartbreak or bloodshed, they bear no poet's name but are ferre naturae and have the flavor of wild game. In the forms in which they are preserved, few of them are older than the seventeenth century or the latter part of the sixteenth century, though many in their original shape are doubtless much older. A very few of the Robin Hood ballads go back to the fifteenth century and to the charming ballad of the nut-brown maid and the famous border ballad of Chevy Chase which describes a battle between the retainers of the two great houses of Douglas and Percy. It was this song of which Sir Philip Sidney wrote, I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas but I found myself more moved than by a trumpet and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder with no rougher voice than rude style. But the style of the ballads was not always rude. In their compressed energy of expression in the impassioned, abrupt yet indirect way in which they tell their tale of grief and horror, there reside often a tragic power and art superior to any English poetry that had been written since Chaucer, superior even to Chaucer in the quality of intensity. The true home of the ballad literature was the north country and especially the Scotch border where the constant forays of moss troopers and the raids and private warfare of the lords of the marches applied many traditions of heroism like those celebrated in the old poem The Battle of Otterborn and in the hunting of the Chevyot or Chevy Chase already mentioned. Some of these are Scotch and others English. The dialect of Lowland Scotland did not in effect differ much from that of Northumberland and Yorkshire both descended alike from the old Northumbrian of Anglo-Saxon times. Other ballads were shortened, popular versions of the chivalry romances which were passing fashion among educated readers in the 16th century and now fell into the hands of the ballad makers. Others preserved the memory of local countryside tales, family feuds and tragic incidents, partly historical and partly legendary associated often with particular spots. Such are for example the dowy dens of Yaro Fair Helen of Kirk Connell The Forsaken Bride and the Tua Corbis. Others again have a coloring of popular superstition like the beautiful ballad concerning Thomas of Erseldoun who goes in at Eldon Hill with an elf queen and spends seven years in fairyland. But the most popular of all the ballads were those which cluster about the name of that good outlaw Robin Hood who with his merry men hunted the forest of Mary Sherwood where he killed the king's deer and way-laid rich travelers but was kind to poor knights and honest workmen. Robin Hood is the true ballad hero, the darling of the common people as Arthur was of the nobles. The names of his confessor, Friar Tuck his mistress maid Marion his companions little John Skaethlock and Much the Miller's son were as familiar as household words. Langland in the 14th century mentions rhymes of Robin Hood and efforts have been made to identify him with some actual personage as with one of the dispossessed barons who had been adherents of Simon de Montfort in his war against Henry III. But there seems to be nothing historical about Robin Hood. He was a creation of the popular fancy. The game laws under the Norman kings were very oppressive and there were doubtless dim memories still cherished among the sacks and masses of Harroword and Edrick the Wild who had defied the power of the conqueror as well as of later free-booters who had taken to the woods and lived by plunder. Robin Hood was a thoroughly national character. The English love of fair play the English readiness to shake hands and make up and keep no malice when worsted in a square fight. He beat and plunder the rich bishops and abbots who had more than their fair share of wealth but he was generous and hospitable to the distressed and lived a free and careless life in the good green wood. He was a mighty archer with those national weapons the longbow and the cloth yard shaft. He tricked and baffled legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness and adventure which marked the free-born, vigorous Yeomanry of England. And finally, the scenery of the forest gives a poetic background and a never-failing charm to the exploits of the old Robin Hood of England and his merry men. The ballads came in time to have a certain tricks of style such as our apt to characterize a body of anonymous folk poetry such as their use of conventional epithets the red-red gold the good green wood the grey goose wing such are certain recurring terms of phrase like but out and spake their stepmother such is finally a kind of sing-song repetition which doubtless helped the ballad singer to memorize his stock as for example, she hadn't put a double rose a rose but only tway or again, and many one sings O grass, O grass and many one sings a corn and many one sings a Robin Hood it was not in the ha the ha nor in the painted bower but it was in the good green wood among the lily flower copies of some of these old ballads were hawked about in the 16th century printed in black letter, broad size or single sheets Wink into word printed in 1489 a little jest of Robin Hood which is a sort of digest of earlier ballads on the subject in the 17th century a few of the English popular ballads were collected in miscellaneous called garlands early in the 18th century the scotch poet Alan Ramsey published a number of scotch ballads in the evergreen and the tea table miscellany but no large and important collection was put forth until Percy's relics, 1765 a book which had a powerful influence upon Wordsworth and Walter Scott in Scotland some excellent ballads in the ancient manner were written in the 18th century such as Jane Elliot's Lament for Flodden and the fine ballad of Sir Patrick Spence Walter Scott's proud maizees in the woods is a perfect reproduction of the pregnant indirect method of old ballad makers in 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks and many Greek scholars with their manuscripts fled into Italy where they began teaching their language and literature and especially the philosophy of Plato there had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during the Middle Ages and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin classics Ovid and Statius were widely read and so was the late Latin poet Boethius whose deconsolazione philosophie had been translated into English by King Alfred and by Chaucer little was known of Virgil at first hand and he was popularly supposed to have been a mighty wizard who made sundry works of enchantment at Rome such as a magic mirror and statue Caxton's so-called translation of the Aeneid was in reality nothing but a version of a French romance based on Virgil's epic of the Roman historians orators and moralists such as Livy, Tacitus, Caesar Cicero and Seneca there was an almost entire ignorance as also of poets like Horace, Lucretius, Juvenal and Catullus the gradual rediscovery of the remains of ancient art and literature which took place in the 15th century and largely in Italy worked an immense revolution in the mind of Europe manuscripts were brought out of their hiding places edited by scholars and spread abroad by means of the printing press statues were dug up and placed in museums and men became acquainted with a civilization far more mature than that of the middle age and with models of perfect workmanship in letters and the fine arts in the latter years of the 15th century a number of Englishmen learned Greek in Italy and brought it back with them to England William Grossen and Thomas Linnaker who had studied at Florence Puget Demetrius Chalcandillus began teaching Greek at Oxford the former as early as 1491 a little later John Colette Dean of St. Paul's and the founder of St. Paul's school and his friend William Lilly the grammarian and first master of St. Paul's 1500 also studied Greek abroad Colette in Italy and Lilly at Rhodes and in the city of Rome Thomas Moore afterward the famous chancellor of Henry VIII was among the pupils of Grossen and Linnaker at Oxford Vither also in 1497 came in search of the new knowledge the Dutchman Erasmus who became the foremost scholar of his time from Oxford the study spread to the sister university where the first English Grecian of his day Sir Jonathan Cheek who taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek became the incumbent of the new professorship founded about 1540 among his pupils were Hashem already mentioned in whose time St. John's College Cambridge was the chief seat of the new learning of which Thomas Nash testifies that it was a university within itself having more candles light in it every winter morning before four of the clock then the four of the clock bell gave strokes Greek was not introduced at the universities without violent opposition from the conservative element who were nicknamed Trojans the opposition came in part from the priests who feared that the new study would sow seeds of heresy yet many of the most devout churchmen were friends of a more liberal culture among them Thomas Moore whose Catholicism was undoubted and who went to the block for his religion Cardinal Wolsey who more succeeded as Chancellor was also a munificent patron of learning and founded Christ Church College at Oxford popular education at once felt the impulse of the new studies and over 20 endowed grammar schools were established in England in the first 20 years of the 16th century Greek became a passion even with the English ladies Asham in his school master a treatise on education published in 1570 says that Queen Elizabeth readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebandary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week and in the same book he tells how calling once upon Lady Jane Gray at Broadgate in Leicestershire he found her in her chamber reading Platonis in Greek and that with as much delight as some gentlemen would read a merry tale in bouquets and when he asked her why she had not gone hunting with the rest she answered I wish all their little sport in the park is but a shadow to that pleasure that I find in Plato Asham's school master as well as his earlier book Toxophilus a platonic dialogue on archery bristles with quotations from the Greek and Latin classics and with that perpetual reference to the authority of antiquity on every topic that he touches which remained the fashion in all serious prose down to the time of Dryden One speedy result of the new learning was fresh translations of the scriptures into English out of the original tongues In 1525 William Tyndall printed at Cologne and Worms his version of the New Testament from the Greek 10 years later Miles Coverdale made at Zurich a translation of the whole Bible from the German and the Latin numerous later translations and the strong beautiful English of Tyndall's testament is preserved for the most part in our authorized version At first it was not safe to make or distribute these early translations in England Numbers of copies were brought into the country however and did much to promote the cause of the Reformation After Henry VIII had broken with the Pope the new English Bible circulated freely among the people Tyndall and Sir Thomas Moore carried on a vigorous controversy in English upon some of the questions at issue between the Church and the Protestants Other important contributions to the literature of the Reformation were the homily sermons preached at Westminster and at Paul's Cross by Bishop Hugh Latimer who was burned at Oxford in the reign of Bloody Mary The English Book of Common Prayer was compiled in 1549-52 Moore was perhaps the best representative of a group of scholars who wished to enlighten and reform the Church from inside and follow Henry VIII in his breach with Rome Dean Collett and John Fisher Bishop of Rochester belonged to the same company and Fisher was beheaded in the same year with Moore and for the same offence namely refusing to take the oath to maintain the act confirming the King's divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage with Anne Boleyn Moore's philosophy is best reflected in his Utopia the description of an ideal Commonwealth modeled on Plato's Republic 16 The name signifies no place, autopos and has furnished an adjective to the language The Utopia was in Latin but Moore's history of Edward V and Richard III, written in 1513 though not printed till 1557 was in English It is the first example in the tongue of a history as distinguished from a chronicle that is, it is a recent and artistic presentation of an historic period and a chronological narrative of events The first three quarters of the 16th century produced no great original work of literature in England It was a season of preparation, of education The storms of the Reformation interrupted and delayed the literary renaissance through the reigns of Henry VIII Edward VI and Queen Mary When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 a more settled order of things began and a period of great national prosperity and glory Meanwhile the English mine had slowly been assimilating the new classical culture which was extended to all classes of readers by the numerous translations of Greek and Latin authors A fresh poetic impulse came from Italy In 1557 appeared Toddles miscellany containing songs and sonnets by a new company of courtly makers Most of the pieces in the volume had been written years before by gentlemen of Henry VIII's court and circulated in manuscript The two chief contributors were Sir Thomas Wyatt at one time English ambassador to Spain and that brilliant noble Henry Howard the Earl of Surrey who was beheaded in 1547 for quartering the king's arms with his own Both of them were dead long before their work was printed The pieces in Toddles miscellany show very clearly the influence of Italian poetry We have seen that Chaucer took subjects and something more from Boccaccio and Petrarch but the sonnet which Petrarch had brought to great perfection was first introduced in England by Wyatt There was a great revival of sonnets hearing in Italy in the 16th century and a number of Wyatt's poems were adaptations of the sonnets and cansony of Petrarch and later poets Others were imitations of Horace's satires and epistles Surrey introduced the Italian blank verse into English in his translation of two books of the Aeneid The love poetry of Toddles miscellany is polished and artificial like the models which it followed and so was Petrarch's Laura Following their example Surrey addressed his love complaints by way of compliment to a little girl of the noble Irish family of Geraldine The amorists, or love sonneteers dwelt on the metaphysics of the passion with a tedious minuteness and the conventional nature of their size and complaints may often be guessed by an experienced reader from the titles of their poems Description of the restless state of a lover with suit to his lady to rue on his dying heart Hell tormenteth not the damned ghost so sore as unkindness the lover The lover prayeth not to be disdained refused mistrusted nor forsaken etc. The most genuine utterance of Surrey was his poem written while imprisoned in Windsor a cage where so many a songbird has grown vocal and Wyatt's little piece of eight lines of his return from Spain is worth reams of his amateury affections Nevertheless, the writers and titles miscellany were real reformers of English poetry they introduced new models of style and new metrical forms and they broke away from the medieval traditions which had hitherto obtained The language had undergone some changes since Chaucer's time which made his scansion obsolete The accent of many words of French origin like nature, carrage, vertu, mater, had shifted to the first syllable and the E of the final syllables E, and E, had largely disappeared But the language of poetry tends to keep up archaisms of this kind and in Stephen Hawes who wrote a century after Chaucer we still find such lines as these But he, my strokeus, might write well in door He was so great and huge of Poisson's Hawes has practiced his variable in this respect and so is his contemporary skeletons But in Wyatt and Surrey who wrote only a few years later that he is reading verse pronounced quite in the modern fashion But Chaucer's example still continued potent Spencer revived many of his obsolete words both in pastoral and in his fairy queen thereby imparting an antique remoteness to his diction but incurring Ben Johnson's censure that he written no language A poem that stands midway between Spencer and late medieval work of Chaucer's school such as Hawes' pastime of pleasure was the induction contributed by Thomas Blackville Lord Buckhurst in 1563 to a collection of narrative poems called The Mirror for Magistrates The whole series was the work of many hands modeled upon Lidgate's falls of princes taken from Boccaccio and was designed as a warning to great men of the fickleness of fortune The induction is the only noteworthy part of it It was an allegory written in Chaucer's seven-line stanza and described with a somber imaginative power of sorrow, her abode in the grisly lake of Avernus and her attendance remorse, dread, old age, etc. Sackville was the author of the first regular English tragedy Gorba Duc and it was at his request that Asim wrote The Schoolmaster Italian poetry also fed the genius of Edmund Spencer 1552-99 While a student at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge he had translated some of the visions of Petrarch and the visions of Belay as a French poet, but it was only in 1579 that the publication of his Shepard's calendar announced the coming of a great original poet the first since Chaucer The Shepard's calendar was a pastoral in twelve eclogues, one for each month of the year There had been a great revival of pastoral poetry in Italy and France but with one or two insignificant exceptions Spencer's were the first bucolic in English Two of his eclogues were paraphrases of St. Marot, a French Protestant poet whose Psalms were greatly in fashion at the court of France the first The pastoral machinery had been used by Virgil and by his modern imitators, not merely to portray the loves of Streffan and Chloe or the idyllic charms of rustic life but also as a vehicle of compliment, elegy, satire, and personal allusion of many kinds Spencer, accordingly alluded to his friends, Sydney and Harvey as the Shepards, and Habanol, paid court to Queen Elizabeth as Cynthia and introduced in the form of anagrams names of the High Church Bishop of London Elmer and the Low Church Archbishop Grindel The conventional pastoral is a somewhat delicate, exotic in English poetry and represents a very unreal Arcadia Before the end of the 17th century the squeak of the Oaten pipe had become a burden and the only piece of the kind which it is easy to read without some impatience is Milton's Icidus The Shepards calendar, however, though it belongs to an artificial order of literature had the unmistakable stamp of genius in its style. There was a broad, easy mastery of the resources of language, a grace, fluency and music which were new to English poetry It was written while Spencer was in service with the Earl of Leicester and enjoying the friendship of his nephew the all accomplished Sydney and was perhaps composed at the latter's country seat of Pencehurst In the following year, Spencer went to Ireland as private secretary to Arthur Lord Grey of Wilton, who had just been appointed Lord Deputy of that Kingdom After filling several clerkships in the Irish government, Spencer received a grant of the castle and a state of Kilcleman, a part of the forfeited lands of the rebel Earl of Desmond Here, among landscapes richly wooded like the scenery of his own fairyland, under the coolly shades of the green alders by the Mullah's shore, Sir Walter secretly found him in 1589 busy upon his fairy queen In his poem Colin Clout's Come Home Again Spencer tells in pastoral language how the shepherd of the ocean persuaded him to go to London, where he presented him to the queen, under whose patronage the first three books of his great poem were printed in 1590 A volume of minor poems entitled Complaints followed in 1591 and the three remaining books of the fairy queen in 1596 In 1595-96 he published also his Daphneida, Prothalmion and the four hymns on Love and Beauty, and on Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beauty In 1598, in Tyrone's Rebellion Kilcleman Castle was sacked and burned, and Spencer with his family fled to London, where he died in January 1599 The fairy queen reflects perhaps more fully than any other English work, the many-sided literary influences of the Renaissance It was the blossom of a richly composite culture Its immediate models were Areostos Orlando Furioso, the first forty cantos of which were published in 1515, and Tassos Gerusselemme Liberata, printed in 1581 Both of these were in subject romances of chivalry, the first based upon the old Charlemagne epos, Orlando being identical with the hero of the French chanson de Roland, the most crusade, and the recovery of the Holy City from the Saracen But in both of them there was a splendor of diction and a wealth of coloring quite unknown to the rude medieval romances Areosto and Tassos wrote with the great epics of Homer and Virgil constantly in mind, and all about them was the brilliant light of Italian art in its early freshness and power The fairy queen, too, was a tale of knight errantry Its hero was King Arthur, and its pages swarmed with the familiar adventures of Gothic romance, distressed ladies and their champions, combats with dragons and giants, enchanted castles, magic rings, charmed wells, forest hermitages, etc But side by side with these appear the fictions of Greek mythology and the personified abstractions of fashionable allegory knights, squires, wizards, hamidriads, satyrs, and river gods, idleness, gluttony, and superstition jostle each other in Spencer's fairyland, descents to the infernal shades in the manner of Homer and Virgil alternate with descriptions of the palace of pride in the manner of the Romand of the Rose But Spencer's imagination was a powerful spirit and held all these diverse elements in solution He removed them to an ideal sphere apart from place with holding time where they seem all alike equally real the dateless conceptions of the poet's dream The poem was to have been a continued allegory or dark conceit the hero of each book representing one of the twelve moral virtues Only six books and the fragment of a seventh were written By way of complimenting his patrons and securing contemporary interest Spencer undertook to make his allegory a double one personal and historical as well as moral or abstract Thus, Gloriana, the queen of fairy stands not only for glory but for Elizabeth to whom the poem was dedicated Prince Arthur is Lysester as well as Magnificence Elsa is Falsehood but also Mary, Queen of Scots Grand torto is Philip II of Spain Sir Artigal is Justice but likewise he is Sir Arthur Grey de Wilton Other characters Shadow 4th Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Philip Sidney Henry IV of France, etc and such public events as the revolt of the Spanish Netherlands, the Irish Rebellion the execution of Mary Stuart and the rising of the Northern Catholic houses against Elizabeth are told in parable In this way the poem reflects the spiritual struggle of the time the warfare of young England against Popery and Spain The allegory is not always easy to follow it is kept up most carefully in the first two books but it sat rather lightly on Spencer's conscience and is not of the essence of the poem it is an ornament put on from the outside and detachable at pleasure The Spensarian stanza in which the fairy queen was written was adapted from the Atavarima of Ariosto Spencer exchanged somewhat the order of the rhymes in the first eight lines and added a ninth line of twelve syllables thus affording more space to the copious luxuriance of his style and the long drawn sweetness of his verse it was his instinct to dilate and elaborate every image to the utmost and his similes especially each of which usually fills a whole stanza have the pictorial amplitude of homers Spencer was in fact a great painter his poetry is almost purely sensuous the personages in the fairy queen are not characters but richly coloured figures moving to the accompaniment of delicious music in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth Charles Lamb said that he was the poet's poet that is he appealed wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty not until Keith's did another English poet appear so filled with the passion for all outward shape of beauty so exquisitely alive to all impressions of the senses Spencer was in some respects more an Italian than an English poet it is said that the Venetian gondoliers still sing that stanzas of tasso's Gerusaleme liberata it is not easy to imagine the Thames Bargees chanting passages from the fairy queen those English poets who have taken strongest hold upon their public have done so by their profound interpretation of our common life but Spencer escaped altogether from reality into a region of pure imagination his aerial creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids which have no root in the soil but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the air their birth was of the womb of morning dew and their conception of the glorious prime among the minor poems of Spencer the most delightful were his Prothalamion and Epithalamion the first was a spousal verse made for the double wedding of the ladies Catherine and Elizabeth Somerset whom the poet figures as two white swans swimming down the Thames who surfaced the nymphs drew with lilies till it appears like a bride's chamber floor sweet Thames runs softly till I end my song is the burden of each stanza the Epithalamion was Spencer's own marriage song written to crown his series of amaretty or love sonnets and is the most splendid hymn of triumphant love in the language hardly less beautiful than these was Mui Potmos the musical myth of Arachne the spider the four hymns in praise of love and beauty, heavenly love and heavenly beauty are also stately and noble poems but by reason of their abstractness and the platonic mysticism which they express are less generally pleasing than the others mentioned allegorian mysticism had no natural affiliation with Spencer's genius he was a seer of visions of images full, brilliant and distinct and not like Bunyan, Dante or Hawthorne, a projector into bodily shapes of ideas typical and emblematic the shadows which haunt the conscience and the mind End of Part 1, Chapter 2 Recording by Kalinda in Lüneburg, Germany on March 21st, 2009