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of the Great Seal, and nephew of Lord Burleigh, Elizabeth's great Prime Minister. The opportunity was thus open for him to follow a public career; and though under Elizabeth his progress was slow, under James I he rose through one legal office after another until in 1617 he became Lord Keeper, and in 1619 Lord High Chancellor. In 1621, when accused of taking bribes, and impeached, he pleaded guilty and threw himself upon the mercy of the House of Lords, although maintaining to the last that he never "had bribe or reward in his eye or thought when he pronounced any sentence or order." The heavy sentence pronounced by the Lords was in large part remitted by the King, but Bacon never again sat in Parliament. He died in 1626, having spent the last five years of his life studying and writing.

With characteristic Elizabethan versatility Bacon combined in one person the statesman, philosophical scientist, and man of letters. As a philosopher he did much to establish and popularize inductive reasoning, the basis of all modern scientific progress. As a man of letters he is significant for both Latin and English work. Believing Latin to be the permanent language of scholarship, he wrote comparatively little in English. The Advancement of Learning (1605) was intended to be a summary of existing knowledge and an introduction to his projected but unfinished Instauratio Magna. But it is chiefly as the author of the Essays that Bacon is remembered by students of English literature. Published first in 1597, again in larger number in 1612, and finally, fifty-eight in all, in 1625, the Essays show Bacon to be the master of terse, concise English, and a thinker whose ideas are always stimulating.

Editions of the Essays are numerous and accessible. Good brief biographies are Church's (E. M. L.), and Abbott's Francis Bacon, an Account of his Life and Works (Macmillan). Lee's essay in his Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century (Scribners') is noteworthy.

CAROLINE SONG WRITERS

Between the lyrics of the Jacobean and Caroline poets and those of the Elizabethans there are certain general differences in spirit and manner. Where the temper of the earlier age was adventurous and enthusiastic that of the later was intellectual and critical. In the drama Ben Jonson led a revolt against romanticism in favor of a new realism based upon classical dicta and involving more of an insistence on form. So in the lyric his influence was exerted along the same line, and we notice an undoubted gain in art. To offset this gain, however, there took place a divorce between art and morals, where in the Elizabethan age the two had been happily wedded. The court had degenerated steadily in character. Elizabeth's court was not only brilliant, it was morally sound, and enjoyed the confidence of the people. James I, as a Scotchman, did not evoke the national loyalty as had Elizabeth, nor was his personality such as to endear him to his subjects. The gap between court and people widened stead

ily; and while the people remained sound at heart, the court under the Stuarts became more shameless, until the steadily growing antagonism took shape in the definite division between the Cavalier and Puritan parties.

The lyrics composed by the group of men called the Cavalier Poets accurately reflect court conditions. Suckling, Lovelace, and Carew were courtiers, and the cynicism, the nonchalance, and the sophistication of their verses contrast with the artlessness and sincerity of the Elizabethan poetry. Occasionally, of course, even these elegant triflers have their serious moments, and then they give us such perfect things as To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars. But the mood of Why so Pale and Wan, Fond Lover? is much more typical. In the elegance, the attention to form, and the greater metrical regularity and simplicity of these Cavalier lyrics, is felt the influence of Jonson, whom all these men followed as their master.

The best of the Cavalier poets, however, was no courtier, but a country clergyman, Robert Herrick (1591-1674). He was born before the death of Marlowe and died in the same year as Milton, but his poetical work belongs to the reign of Charles I. After graduating from Cambridge he entered the church, and was given the parish of Dean Prior in South Devonshire; dispossessed by the Puritans in 1647, he returned in 1662, and there died. His single volume, Hesperides and Noble Numbers, was printed in 1648. Though Herrick protested that his life in Devon, far from the gay world of London, was that of an exile, his delight in his country surroundings is unfeigned and altogether delightful, and The Argument of his Book gives a very fair indication of the book's contents. Clergyman though he was, there was nothing of the ascetic in Herrick. His devotional poetry in Noble Numbers, while probably sincere enough, is certainly not notable for fervor. He is really a hedonist, an Epicurean, enjoying the good things of life while they last, and the true gods of his devotion are pagan deities-Pan and Bacchus and Venus. It is next to impossible to overpraise Herrick as a lyric artist. The simplicity and purity of diction, the freedom from affectation, the dainty perfection of form, and the exquisite lightness and sureness of touch of these poems make Herrick's book one of the most charming_collections of lyric verse in the whole range of English poetry.

A spiritual reaction against the license of the times is seen in the group of devotional poets represented by Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw. They were Church of England men, not Puritans (Crashaw was a Catholic), living retired and pious lives, and singing their hymns of praise and prayer with a sweet fervor, uncorrupted by the world. The chief literary influence upon their verse is that of Donne, and the elaborate ingenuity characteristic of their work caused Dr. Johnson to dub them "the metaphysical poets," although the fondness for "conceit which prompted the appellation was common enough in English poetry before Donne ever set pen to paper.

General references on the Caroline lyric are the same as for the Elizabethan. A good an

thology, with an excellent introduction, is Schelling's Seventeenth Century Lyrics (Ginn). There is a delightful essay on Herrick in E. Gosse's Seventeenth Century Studies (Dodd, Mead, and Co.)

SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682)

Browne was born in London, and after going through Winchester and Oxford, studied at the most famous medical schools of Europe,-Montpelier, Padua, and Leyden, obtaining an M. D. at the last. He returned to England, settled in Norwich, and there passed the rest of his life as a practicing physician, apparently quite undisturbed by the turmoil of the Civil War. He was knighted in 1671.

Browne's prose is the leisure product of a man who is both a scientist and a mystic. Religio Medici (1643, written some years earlier), a confession of his personal beliefs, shows the duality of his nature in its separation of science and religion, and its acceptance of revealed religion as a mystery to be taken on faith. Herein occurs Browne's perfect self-characterization: "Methinks there be not impossibilities enough in religion for an active faith. . . . I love to lose myself in a mystery; to pursue my reason to an O Altitudo!" The Vulgar Errors (1646), an examination of popular superstitions, confutes many by an application of scientific principles, and accepts as possible others equally preposterous simply by failure to apply the same principles. Urn-Burial (1658) is Browne's best known and most splendid work. It may not be quite fair to say of Browne that the style makes the man, for a most agreeable personality appears in his pages. But certainly it is their unique style rather than their intellectual qualities which has kept Browne's books alive. His sentences are involved, and his vocabulary staggers under its load of polysyllabic latinisms. But these same ponderous vocables confer a sonorous majesty and a subtle harmony of rhythm which make this prose as impressive in its way as Milton's verse. Shot through and through with imaginative beauty by a mind that loved to linger over the inscrutability and brevity of human life, these long periods sweep on with the subdued pomp and somber glory of a funeral cortege.

FULLER (1608-1661)

After eight years of study at Cambridge Fuller entered the church, and finally became preacher at the Savoy Chapel in London, being famous for his witty and sensible sermons. In the Civil War he was in active service as chaplain to one of the Royalist regiments. During the Commonwealth he supported himself by his writing, and by the aid of patrons who secured him preaching appointments and private chaplaincies. After the Restoration he returned to the Savoy, and was made chaplain-in-extraordinary to Charles II, but died shortly after of typhoid fever.

Fuller's chief works are the History of the Holy War (1639), an account of the Crusades; The Holy State and the Profane State (1642), a series of

"characters," each illustrated by a brief biography of an appropriate person in history; A Church History of Britain (1655), from the birth of Christ to 1648; and The History of the Worthies of England (1662), in which Fuller takes up the counties of England one by one, lists for each its most notable products and curiosities, and gives short accounts of its notable men. Fuller's writing lacks the eloquence of Browne's or Taylor's, but it is clear, straightforward, sensible, and witty. He is fond of antithesis, pun, quip, anecdote, and even his most serious work is enlivened by unexpected sallies.

WALTON (1593-1683)

Izaak Walton was born at Stafford, in 1593. In 1614 he was engaged in trade in London. Thirty years later he left the city, and spent the remaining forty years of life in quiet retirement, visiting his many clerical friends, writing biographies of Herbert, Hooker, and others, and always practicing his art of angling and gathering information for the book by which he is best known.

Walton's memory lives because of The Complete Angler. This he published first in 1653; the fifth edition, which appeared in 1676, contained much new material that Walton had accumulated during twenty-odd years of leisure. The book became at once the locus classicus of information concerning angling; it remains to this day the most delightful treatise on the pleasures of a sport concerning which much has been written.

TAYLOR (1613-1667)

Jeremy Taylor was born under the shadow of Cambridge University, and spent his youth in a little round of home, school, and college, taking his first degree at seventeen, a fellowship and holy orders at twenty, and the master's degree at twentyone. Though Milton and other famous literary lights were at Cambridge in his time, Taylor seems to have had no contact with them. In 1634 he went to London to preach as a substitute at St. Paul's, and made so striking a success in the pulpit lately vacated by that great preacher John Donne, that he attracted the attention of Archbishop Laud, who made him a fellow of All-Souls, Oxford; later he was given a living at Uppingham, near Cambridge. The placid course of his life was interrupted by the Civil War, in which he followed the Royalist cause and was made one of the King's chaplains. He somehow drifted to South Wales, taught in a private school, and became chaplain to the Earl of Carbery, at whose residence, Golden Grove, he did his best literary work-Holy Living (1650), Holy Dying (1651), and some fine sermons. Between 1654 and 1658 he was three times imprisoned by the Puritans, then obtained a small position in Ireland, and after the Restoration was made Bishop of one of the Irish sees, and Vice-Chancellor of Dublin University. His last years were harassed and embittered by controversy, and were productive of no first-rate literary work.

Taylor enjoyed a great reputation as a pulpit

orator, and his sermons are notable for fervor and brilliant rhetoric. It is, however, upon Holy Living, practical directions for the conduct of life, and the more beautiful Holy Dying, that his fame chiefly rests. In comparison with that of his great contemporaries Browne and Milton, Taylor's prose has a decidedly modern effect, being simpler in vocabulary and sentence structure. It has not the sustained grandeur of Browne's, but is distinguished by its wealth of illustrationfigure, anecdote, and quotation-happily employed, and lending a rich poetic quality.

Holy Living and Holy Dying are reprinted in Bohn's Library. The best short life is by E. Gosse (E. M. L.).

MILTON (1608-1674)

John Milton, the voice of Puritan England, was born in a London home which, Puritan though it was, yet did not have to banish the refining graces of culture to make room for piety. From its atmosphere of learning and music he had not far to go to reach St. Paul's School; school days over, he went up to Christ's College, Cambridge, where his fair beauty of complexion and hair and fineness of spirit gained for him the name surely implying no effeminacy of temper-of "the Lady of Christ's." After seven years of residence he took his master's degree in 1632, and retired to his father's new home in Horton, a quiet village on the Thames, where he spent six years in study and deliberate cultivation of his literary faculty. In 1638 he started on the grand tour, but the news of troublous times in England cut short his travels; "I thought it shame," he says, "to be travelling for amusement abroad while my fellow citizens were fighting for liberty at home." So home he came to play a man's part in the civil strife of the next twenty years. With his pen he fought on the Puritan side, and on the establishment of the Commonwealth in 1649 was appointed Latin Secretary to conduct the foreign correspondence of Cromwell's government. Zealous performance of his duties brought him the reward of total blindness, but with the aid of an amanuensis he labored on, until the Restoration in 1660 drove him into retirement. In poverty, obscurity, and loneliness he spent the remaining fourteen years of life, doubtless reflecting in bitterness of spirit on the license of those Restoration days, but sustained by the writing of his greatest poetry.

Milton's work falls naturally into three divisions: 1, the minor poems; 2, political prose; 3, the major poems.

1. While still at Cambridge Milton had given earnest of his powers by the beautiful Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, the fine sonnet On Being Arrived at the Age of Twenty-three, and the lines on Shakespeare prefixed to the 1632 folio of Shakespeare's plays. The six years at Horton brought forth the companion pieces L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, fresh with the beauty of country scenery, and yet filled with the enthusiasm of the scholar for his books; the masque Comus, composed for an inaugural festivity of 1634, wherein this

favorite form of courtly diversion is made to serve as handmaid to the expression of a serious theme, the praise of virtue; and Lycidas, flower of English elegiac poetry. The first two of these so-called "minor" poems are done in the full spirit of the Renaissance; Comus, with its moral earnestness, and Lycidas, notably in the passage on the corruption of the church, show the Puritan in Mil

ton.

2. The prose writings consist mainly of controversial pamphlets on political and religious matters. They include pamphlets against episcopacy, four on divorce, the wise and liberal Tractate on Education, and many arguments in defense of the Puritan party, the best of them being Eikonoklastes (The Image Smasher, in reply to Eikon Basilike, The Royal Image, an idealization of Charles I) and the Latin Defense of the English People. The greatest of Milton's prose works, however, is the Areopagitica (1644), a plea for freedom of the press, eloquent and impassioned. Milton said of prose that he had in it but the use of his left hand. But although his is in some points of style inferior to Bacon's, it has a grandeur and loftiness that were far beyond Bacon; the tremendous conviction of a righteous cause surges through it, and lifts it at times to magnificent heights of eloquence.

3. The works of the last period are three: Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). The last is the story of Samson, cast in the mould of Greek tragedy; its austere beauty gains in impressiveness from the likeness between the situation of Milton, old and blind and forlorn in a hostile age, and that of the Israelite champion, a blind captive among the Philistines. Paradise Regained shows the redemption of mankind through Christ's temptation in the wilderness; in interest and beauty it is inferior to its predecessor. Paradise Lost, “the life history of the universe," written to

"assert eternal Providence,

And justify the ways of God to men,"

is the great epic of the modern world, equalled only by Dante's Divine Comedy in loftiness of conception and grandeur of execution. It would be idle to deny that the execution is unequal; there are dreary wastes of theological dialectic which all readers shun. But these are spots on the face of the sun. Milton calls to the service of his celestial muse all the resources of his vast learning and all the splendors of an imagination of unbounded sweep and daring, and the greater part of the epic is not only morally sublime, it is superbly beautiful poetry. In particular, it is written in blank verse unsurpassed for harmony and majesty, the perfect example of what Arnold calls "the grand style."

The Life of Milton by D. Masson (6 vols., Macmillan) is the standard source of information; good shorter biographies are by M. Pattison (E. M. L.) and Walter Raleigh (Putnams). Single volume editions are by A. W. Verity (Cambridge Univ. Press), Masson (Macmillan), W. V. Moody (Houghton Mifflin). The prose is published in Bohn's Library.

PEPYS (1633-1703)

Samuel Pepys, who quite unconsciously made himself one of the most interesting if not most significant figures of English literature, was born in 1633. From St. Paul's School, London, he went up in 1651 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he remained three or four years. On leaving the University he married, and soon attached himself to his cousin Sir Edward Montagu, later the Earl of Sandwich, to whom he owed much of his subsequent advancement. In 1660 he went with the expedition that brought Charles II back to England, acting as secretary to Montagu, the commander-in-chief. The same year he was appointed "Clerk of the Acts" in the Navy Office, and began the keeping of his diary. Until 1688 he was actively engaged in governmental affairs, part of the time as member of Parliament, but chiefly in the Admiralty, where his record was brilliant. Because of his intimate friendship with the Duke of York he was at times attacked by political enemies; charges of peculation were brought against him, but none were proved. With the exile of James II in 1688 Pepys's official career ended. He was dismissed from the Admiralty in March, 1689; the remaining years of his life he spent in retirement, and died in 1703.

The manuscript of the Diary, by which Pepys is known to the world, was among the books he willed to Magdalene College. It was written in short-hand, for no eye but his own, and was at once an honest record of fact, and a complete revelation of Pepys's character. Attention was first drawn to it by an article of Sir Walter Scott's (1826), reviewing a fragmentary edition of the year preceding. Since that time many editions have appeared, the last and best being that edited by Henry Wheatley, and published by George Bell and Sons in eight volumes.

DRYDEN (1631-1700)

John Dryden was born in 1631, in Northamptonshire. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, he published in 1658 his Stanzas to the memory of Oliver Cromwell. At the time of the Restoration he wrote the most distinguished of the many welcomes to Charles II, Astræa Redux. In 1663 he began writing for the stage, and by 1670 had attained such eminence that he was appointed Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, with a stipend of two hundred pounds. A pension of one hundred pounds was later added to this, and in 1683 he became Collector of the Port of London. The revolution of 1688 deprived him of all his public honors, and forced him to spend the last twelve years of his life writing for a living. He died in 1700, generally acknowledged England's leading man of letters.

Of Dryden may be said what Dr. Johnson said of Goldsmith: "There is almost no form of writing which he did not attempt, and no form that he attempted did he fail to adorn." His dramas were many and popular; his religious poems, Religio

Laici (1682) and The Hind and the Panther (1687), the first a poem in support of the Church of England, and the second Dryden's poetical confession of faith in Roman Catholicism, illustrate his command of the heroic couplet and his ability to reason in verse, at the same time that they exhibit the least pleasing phase of Dryden's character, his willingness to abandon an unprofitable for a profitable cause. For caustic wit his greatest satires, Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and MacFlecknoe (1682) have never been surpassed in English. At least two lyrics, the Song for St. Cecilia's Day and Alexander's Feast, witness his ability to move easily in forms other than the heroic couplet which he virtually established. As a translator of Virgil, Homer, and other classical poets, he did much to familiarize English readers with the literatures of Greece and Rome. In prose works such as the Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668) and the Preface to the Fables (1699) he showed keen critical ability and the power to write clear and readable prose. During the last ten years of his life Dryden was a frequenter of Will's Coffee House, where in his easy chair he presided over the English literary world much as Dr. Johnson was to do seventy-five years later in The Club. Although generally neglected to-day, Dryden was a man of great power, and both by example and precept did much to establish the literary fashions that were to prevail in England until the time of Wordsworth.

The best one volume edition of Dryden is the Cambridge (Houghton Mifflin), although this does not contain the plays. The Scott-Saintsbury (Paterson, Edinburgh) is complete, although too cumbersome for general use. The best brief biography is Saintsbury's (E. M. L.). Lowell's essay in Among My Books, and William Hazlitt's in Lectures on the English Poets, are suggestive and valuable.

DEFOE (1660?-1731)

Over Daniel Defoe's life and character there hangs a veil of mystery which baffles accurate biography. He was the son of a London butcher, a Dissenter, and went for a few years to a Dissenters' school. Then he dropped out of sight, to reappear in 1684 as a London merchant getting married. By 1688 he was sufficiently interested in politics to join actively in supporting William of Orange. Whatever his business, his affairs were in so bad a state in 1691 that he went bankrupt to the tune of £17,000; a managership of a tile factory set him on his feet again. His literary activity dates apparently from about 1697, though he had done some writing before that; but it was in 1701, with The True-born Englishman, that Defoe made his first great hit, for it brought not only popular but royal favor, and perhaps secret employment by the King. Defoe was now launched upon a career, of pamphlet writing which lasted throughout the rest of his life, and produced an almost unbelievable number of articles on all sorts of subjects. The best known of these, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702), led to the author's imprisonment and exhibition in the pillory. After

his release from Newgate he started The Review, a tri-weekly political periodical, which ran 170413, of first-rate importance in the history of the newspaper. For many years Defoe added to his pamphleteering and journalistic activities the business of a government agent, ostensibly on behalf of the Tory ministry, but certainly with bad breaches of faith to his employers. As Trent says: "For more than twenty years he practised every sort of subterfuge to preserve his anonymity, and he soon grew sufficiently callous to write, presumably for pay, on all sides of any given subject. Within the arena of journalism he was a treacherous mercenary who fought all comers with any weapon and stratagem he could command." In 1719 Defoe displayed in the large the combination of journalistic and narrative skill he had shown on a small scale as far back as 1706 in The Apparition of Mrs. Veal by getting an account of the solitary life of Alexander Selkirk on the island of Juan Fernandez and expanding it into Robinson Crusoe. The immediate popularity of the book Defoe turned to account by publishing in the next few years the series of prose fictions which constitute his real title to fame: Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), Captain Singleton (1720), Moll Flanders (1722), Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Colonel Jack (1722), Roxana (1724). The last six years of his life were employed in writing books of no moment and pamphlets on a great variety of matters.

Defoe's importance in the history of English literature comes (1) through The Review, which initiated certain ideas, such as the editorial and the special article, still employed in journalism, and but for which The Tatler and The Spectator might never have been conceived; (2) through his fictions, which are perhaps not novels in the modern sense of the word, since plot and characterization are only rudimentary, but which by their verisimilitude, effectiveness of single situations, and general popularity, paved the way for the work of Richardson and Fielding. At all events Defoe's "genius for lying like the truth" has rarely been equalled in English fiction.

Defoe's chief works are reprinted in the Bohn Library; there is a good edition of the novels, with introduction by G. A. Aitken (Dent & Co.). The most up-to-date biography is the brief chapter in the Cambridge History of English Literature (vol. ix) by W. P. Trent.

SWIFT (1667–1745)

Jonathan Swift's involuntary and reluctant connection with Ireland, which he always resented as a trick of adverse fate, began with his birth there, though his parents were English. His father died before he was born, leaving his mother poor, and it was only through the assistance of relatives that Swift was able to go to Trinity College, Dublin. There he made no brilliant record, obtaining his degree only by special favor. In 1689 place was made for him in the household of Sir William Temple, a well known figure in English politics and letters; though his secretarial duties were light, and though Temple seems to have treated the young man with

consideration, Swift's proud temper made him intolerant of patronage, and to secure independence he entered the church. During the years of residence with Temple at Moor Park, Swift wrote his first satires, The Battle of the Books, a jen d'esprit on a squabble over the comparative merits of ancient and modern literature, and The Tale of a Tub, a powerful attack on the Catholics and Dissenters in particular, and, in general, on the folly of creed insistence on non-essentials. At Moor Park, too, Swift met and came to love Esther Johnson, a ward of Temple's, some years younger than Swift, but his greatest friend through life.

On Temple's death in 1699 Swift was given a living at Laracor, near Dublin. The publication of the two early satires in 1704 made his reputation, and he continued to use his pen in political and religious controversy. At first a Whig, he joined the Tories in 1710, and for several years was a dominant figure in public life. Of the writings of these years The Conduct of the Allies (1711), a pamphlet written in opposition to Whig support of the war with France, is the best example. Swift hoped for an English bishopric, but The Tale of a Tub had ruined his chances and he was forced to be content with being made Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin. On the downfall of the Tory ministry in 1714 Swift returned to Dublin, and there spent the rest of his life, exiled from the society where he had cut so brilliant a figure, and nursing a grudge against all the world. Of Swift's London days The Journal to Stella, a sort of diary which Swift kept for the entertainment of Esther Johnson, gives an accurate and pleasing account. For Stella Swift cherished a devoted affection, and though the rumor that the two were secretly married has never been proved true, it was Stella who made life tolerable for the lonely Dean until her death in 1728. Despite his dislike for Ireland Swift's heart burned at the wretchedness and oppression of the Irish people, and he endeared himself to them by such writings as the Drapier's Letters (1724), defeating an English scheme to debase the Irish coinage, and the mordant Modest Proposal (1729). In 1726 was published Gulliver's Travels, most delightful of fictions and most terrible of satires. Swift's last years were embittered by loneliness and physical agony and clouded by madness.

By virtue of his sheer intellectual power and his passionate feeling Swift is preeminent among English satirists, particularly in the use of irony. Under the childish squabbles of the brothers in The Tale of a Tub concerning their coats, under the marvels of Gulliver's adventures, under the coldly logical brutality of the Modest Proposal, seethes passionate scorn for the pettiness, the hypocrisy, and the inhumanity of the human race. Swift, unlike Dryden and Pope, does not satirize the individual; rather he expresses his savage contempt for man himself, and in the depiction of the Yahoos he has presented the most terrible indictment of human frailty that the mind of man has ever conceived. The contrast between the utter misanthropy of his writings and the facts of his private life-his love for Stella, his service of the Irish people, and his secret benefactions among the

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