Art. IV. THE ELIZABETHAN LYRIC. 1. An English Garner. Edited by E. Arber, 1877-1883. New edition. London: Constable, 1896. 2. England's Helicon. Edited by A. H. Bullen. London: Nimmo, 1887. 3. Davison's Poetical Rhapsody. Two vols. Edited by the same. London: Bell, 1890-1891. 4. Lyrics from the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age; More Lyrics from the Song-books of the Elizabethan Age; and Poems from Romances and Prose Tracts of the Elizabethan Age. Edited by the same. London: Nimmo, 1887-1890. 5. Lyrics from the Dramatists. Edited by the same. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1891. 6. The Works of Dr Thomas Campion. Edited by the same. Privately printed. London: Chiswick Press, 1889. 7. The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. Edited by F. T. Palgrave. New edition. London: Macmillan, 1891. 8. A Paradise of English Poetry. Arranged by H. C. Beeching. London: Rivingtons, 1893. 9. The Golden Pomp, a Procession of English Lyrics. Arranged by A. T. Quiller-Couch. London: Methuen, 1895. 10. The Muses' Garden for Delights. Edited by W. B. Squire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1901. In the year 1600 there issued from the press an anthology called 'England's Helicon,' which may be taken as inaugurating, not only a new century, but also a new epoch in English literature. It was put together by a certain A. B., who is not identified, but must have been a person of remarkable taste in letters; and it was dedicated to a certain John Bodenham, of whom all that is known is that he was the projector of various volumes of elegant extracts. Tottel's Miscellany, published in 1557, the book of 'Songs and Sonnets,' by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Lord Surrey-which, as we learn from the Merry Wives of Windsor,' still represented poetry to the country gentleman at the end of the sixteenth century-had been followed after two decades of silence by a cluster of anthologies : The Paradise of Dainty Devices' (1576); 'A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions' (1578); A Handful of Pleasant Delights' (1584); 'The Phoenix Nest' (1593). But 6 though each of these contained some singable songs and readable verse, and the last of them, 'The Phoenix Nest,' displayed a few symptoms of the new era that was approaching, on the whole their names were the best thing about them. England's Helicon' marks a complete change of style. To open England's Helicon' is to pass for the first time into the Arcadia of pastoral poetry. How had this remarkable change come about? It was due, not to any general renaissance of taste or learning, but to the initiative and genius of two men, Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser. This becomes clear if we recollect that the Italian models, upon which this new literature was, to a certain extent, based, had been as accessible to Englishmen in the period of Wyatt and Surrey, who wrote while Henry VIII was on the throne, as in that of Spenser and Sidney. Petrarch wrote Latin eclogues as well as Italian sonnets. He was followed by Baptista of Mantua-the Mantuan whose praises are chanted by Shakespeare's pedant Holofernes. Then Poliziano wrote pastorals in Italian, and was followed by a crowd of poets; and in 1504 Sanazzaro, following a model set by Boccaccio in his 'Ameto,' published an Arcadia' in mixed prose and verse, which, together with its imitation, the 'Diana' of the Portuguese George de Montemayor, formed the prototype of Sidney's romance threequarters of a century later (1580). Moreover, a very industrious verse-writer, George Gascoigne, who dominates the dreary interval between Tottel's Miscellany and 'England's Helicon,' was as 'Italianate' as Sidney. Gascoigne describes himself as 'Chaucer's boy and Petrarch's journeyman,' a style better fitted for Surrey, and entitles one of his books A hundred sundry flowers bound up in one small posy, gathered partly by translation in the fine outlandish gardens of Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, Ariosto, and others, and partly by invention out of our own fruitful orchards in England.' It is all very well therefore to ascribe the credit for the rise of pastoral poetry in England to the 'hotter spirits' of the South, and the direct inspiration of Sanazzaro; but the reason why that particular outlandish importation had not come earlier lay in differences of temperament and circumstance between the two men of genius, in many respects so much akin and alike in the unhappiness of their fate, to whom it fell to Vol. 196.-No. 392; 2 H mediate the Italian influence. The Earl of Surrey followed Wyatt in his preference for the sonnet; that was the direction in which he Petrarchised. Sir Philip Sidney also wrote sonnets; but the greater facility possible to him in this measure, on account of the pioneer's work already accomplished by Surrey, left him at liberty to subdue new provinces to the kingdom of English letters; while the closing to him, by the circumstances of his life as an Elizabethan courtier, of an active and adventurous career in the New World, gave him leisure and awakened a strong desire to find a braver world elsewhere. It is interesting to remark that there is one pastoral song even in Tottel's Miscellany; and this is reprinted in 'England's Helicon,' and attributed there to Lord T. Howard, Earl of Surrey. Lord Thomas Howard, afterwards Duke of Norfolk, was the son of the poet, and, if the song be by him, it is his only known achievement in poetry. It is more likely that the T. in the ascription is a misprint. The poem is in many ways remarkable. It is written in the common ballad metre-a metre not known to have been used elsewhere by Surrey; but it is written with grace and skill, and with both odd and even lines rhymed. The pastoral names, too, are interesting. The nymph bears, probably for the first time in pastoral poetry, the name, afterwards so popular, of Phyllida; the lover's name, Harpalus, also an invention of the poet's, does not seem to have been borrowed by later writers, except by Sir David Murray in his 'Complaint of the Shepherd Harpalus' (1611), and by Anthony Munday, who wrote a reply to Surrey's piece, which stands next after it in England's Helicon.' The poem opens as follows :— 'Phyllida was a fair maid, Whom Harpalus the herdsman pray'd To be his paramour. Harpalus and eke Corin Were herdsmen both yfere; And Phyllida could twist and spin And thereto sing full clear. How often would she flowers twine, How often garlands make Of cowslips and of columbine, And all for Corin's sake!' It is obvious that we have here the work of a practised hand; but whence is the inspiration? Surrey was an excellent artist, but he is not likely to have chosen this new form for English pastoral without some more direct model before him than the popular ballad. The inspiration plainly is not Italian; what English fruit came from the study of Petrarch's and Sanazzaro's canzoni we shall see in a moment. What we have here seems to be a last inspiration from an old French pastoral tradition, distinct from the classical bucolics, perhaps through the medium of the Scots poet Henryson. Henryson writes in an eight-line stanza, which comes closer to the ordinary French form than the ballad metre; but it is not a far cry to 'Phyllida and Harpalus' from Robin and Makin.' · It is not possible to determine whether Sidney or Spenser was the earlier in the field with pastoral poems, because, although the 'Arcadia' was written during Sidney's retirement from court in 1580, and 'The Shepheardes Calender' appeared in 1579, it is probable that some of the 'Arcadia' lyrics, and perhaps some also of the 'Astrophel' poems, had already been written. Spenser is represented in England's Helicon' by two poems from The Shepheardes Calender'- Hobbinol's Ditty in praise of Eliza, Queen of the Shepherds,' and 'Perigot and Cuddy's Roundelay'-an excellent choice, because in these poems we have the real Spenser. In 'The Shepheardes Calender' we find occasionally quite another Spenser, a strong Puritan and anti-Bishop-of-London man, who elects to follow Petrarch and Mantuanus and Marot, as he himself was followed later by Milton, in confusing pastoral poetry with pastoral theology, and who, in consequence, at any rate to a later age, is somewhat dull company. But nothing could be sweeter and fresher and more musical than these two ditties. In one important respect Spenser has harked back behind Tottel's Miscellany, and that is in his use of a tumbling measure. He may have affected this as a rusticity, or he may have deemed it Chaucerian, being a diligent student of Chaucer; for unhappily the secret of Chaucer's rhythm was lost when the inflections which are necessary to the scansion became mute in ordinary speech. Spenser never repeated these tumbling effects; perhaps his later study of Tasso and Ariosto converted him; perhaps Sidney argued him out of them; but he also never quite succeeded in repeating the music of some of these stanzas, which have all the first freshness of an April voice. 'Tell me, have ye seen her angelic face, Her heavenly haviour, her princely grace The red rose medled with the white yfere Her majesty, Where have you seen the like but there? I see Calliope speed her to the place And after her the other Muses trace Bin they not bay-branches, which they do bear, So sweetly they play, And sing all the way, That it a heaven is to hear.' The Shepheardes Calender' was 'entitled to the noble and vertuous gentleman most worthy of all titles both of learning and chevalrie M. Philip Sidney'; and just as Wyatt and Surrey stand together as the great twin brethren of the dawn of modern poetry, each having some necessary gift that the other lacked, so Sidney stands by Spenser. Sidney's poems fall into two classes those that he wrote in the Arcadia,' and those that |