ing 1590; whilst the earliest comedies of Shakespeare exhibit the effects of the "humor" for sonnets.1 The playwrights, however, almost at once perceived the need of a wider scope of sentiment than was to be found in the pastoral mode, and recognized the superior excellence of shorter and sprightlier metrical forms over the slow-paced sonnet. Hence we find the songs of the dramatists vying in wealth of fancy and originality of form with the best work of other lyrists. With the exception of Shakespeare, whose lyrics, like all else that his hand touched, are beyond comparison, no Elizabethan poet has produced so large a number of exquisite songs as John Fletcher. His work of this class displays the same facile grace and ease of expression, the same mastery of effect combined with a complete absence of effort that form the distinctive traits of his dramatic works. Fletcher is not startling, nor very original perhaps, but he has done what many have tried and failed to do: he has united all but perfect beauty to all but perfect naturalness. But Fletcher was not alone in this or in the other graces that adorned the poetry of his age: the gift of lyric song was general amongst the dramatists as amongst other poets. From Chapman and Marston alone

1 "In Love's Labour's Lost," says Mr. Fleay, "he not only introduces two sonnets proper which were published separately in The Passionate Pilgrim as poems by him, but uses the sonnet form in the dialogue in several instances." Cf. i, 1, 163-177, a passage which, however, is not quite a sonnet; iv, 2, 109-122; 3, 60-73, etc. There are two sonnets in Romeo and Juliet, one in All's Well and in Henry V (Fleay, The English Drama, II, 224, and Sh. Manual, p. 135). Mr. T. Hall Caine has discovered "the sextet of a Shakespearean sonnet" in Rich. II, ii, 1, 8-13. It will be noticed that all of these plays are early, All's Well being the only one that falls after 1600. After this Shakespeare did not use the sonnet in his plays.

2 It is, perhaps, fair to state, as to Marston, that the songs which are not infrequently indicated in his plays, have not come down to us. Chapman, the great "Homeri Metaphrastes," needed the compass of

of them all is it difficult to get a lyric which is not at once good and representative. From all the rest comes music of varying melody and compass: the dainty lightness of Lyly, the sweet sincerity of Dekker, the delicate erotic sentiment of Beaumont and Fletcher, the weird and fanciful sorrow of Webster, the classical symmetry and nicety of Jonson, the rich variety and perfect mastery of Shakespeare: whether in the melodious lament for what is fair and fleeting, in the hearty bacchanal of good cheer and good fellowship, or in the love song with its flashing prismatic lights and deep, rich shadows, we have here the perfection of winged music, wedded to the perfection of lyrical emotion.

In the last years of the century an original and potent influence began to make itself felt. Ben Jonson is one of that interesting class of literary men that have a theory about literature; and Jonson's theory was a reasonable and consistent one. It was one view of the subject; it was not the only view. While all art must ultimately resolve itself into an imitation of nature, in Aristotle's sense of that term, it is none the less true that few artists can afford to neglect the careful study of previous interpretations of nature. It was the amateurishness of contemporary art that Jonson criticised, which, when it copied at all, was apt to copy inferior models irresponsibly, and was continually running to excesses of all kinds, to over-ornament, bizarre treatment, carelessness as to construction, confusion of design, departures from simplicity and directness, of all of which his age furnished examples enough. Jonson contended, like Matthew Arnold in our own day, that only in a faithful,

"the vasty deep" in which to spread his "full and swelling sail"; he was stranded in the shallows of a calmly-flowing inland stream. It is notable that even his sonnet sequence A Coronet in Praise of his Mistress Philosophy, becomes little more than a continuous poem written in successive quatorzains.

though neither slavish nor affected, study of the ancients could English literature hope to acquire that professional touch, that sense of taste and proportion, of finish ad unguem, which industry, but no mere genius can supply. He was thus the first to feel theoretically the beginning of the reaction against the excesses of Romanticism run riot ; and he was certainly as judicious in the application of his theories to his own poetry as he was injudicious in ventilating these theories at peculiarly inopportune moments. There has been in the history of literature, in consequence, a curious confusion of Jonson's theories, his practice and his manners. The last were often so bad as scarcely to be conceived worse; but there is much misapprehension still common about the other two. Now all this applies to Jonson's lyrics as well as to his other productions; for Jonson's lyrics are usually found by the critics to be wanting in something or other, if they are not called heavy, harsh, and stiff. The harshness, stiffness, and heaviness of the poetical diction of Ben Jonson is precisely as demonstrable as his undying enmity towards Shakespeare: both are the purest figments of the imagination. Not only shall I agree with Lowell when he tells us : "Yet Ben, with his principles off, could soar and sing with the best of them," but I shall not hesitate to affirm that Ben could soar and sing with his principles on, and possibly because of them. Many of the lyrics of Jonson are nearly perfect in their kind, and the reason for their perfection is, I think, to be found in the happy conjunction of a choice lyrical gift with the cultivated taste of genuine scholarship. To complete Lowell's words of Jonson: "There are strains in his lyrics which Herrick, the most Catullian of poets since Catullus, could imitate but never match."1 I, at least, have no excuse to offer for having included a larger number of the lyrics of

1 Lessing, Lowell's Prose Works, ed. 1890, II, 223.

Jonson in this collection than of any other poet except Shakespeare.

Jonson, Fletcher, and the later dramatists continued the lyric vein to the end of the reign of James and beyond; and the lyrics written for music remained popular to the time of the later collections of Campion, Bateson, and Peerson; whilst an occasional belated sequence of sonnets mixed with madrigals appeared, such as Drummond's. But the golden summer of the English lyric was now on the wane under stress of new and non-lyrical influences; moreover a new and portentous growth had appeared, a species of applied literature, voluminous, nondescript verse devoted to things essentially unpoetical. For now came the days of the Polyolbions and Purple Islands, of verses topographical mythological, and allegorical-anatomical: works that stand like huge Pelasgan walls, inexplicable from the hands of men as men now are. Naturally such works demanded a large attention, and this, with the growing interest in literary prose, took from the popular culture of the lyric, which languished somewhat in the hands of younger men, though still the native utterance of the surviving poets of an older generation.

It is a commonplace of the history of literature that the Jacobean poets wrote under three strong poetic influences, that of Spenser, that of Donne, and that of Jonson. Shakespeare less affected his immediate successors because he rose above mannerism and schools; and yet it would hardly be unfair to say that the best lyrics of Beaumont, of Fletcher and Webster exhibit much of the Shakespearean manner. The lyrical tact and the classic certainty of Jonson's touch descended to several not always the worthiest - of "the tribe of Ben," until the perfection of the hedonistic lyrical spirit in English poetry was reached in Campion, in Carew, and in Herrick. Donne, after no inconsiderable effect upon

many of the minor poets and, indeed, upon Jonson himself, came in a new age to be regarded as more or less remotely the model whence were derived many of the blemishes, and not a few of the graces, of the poetry of Crashaw, Herbert, and others.

The Spenserians concern us less, as the Muse of Spenser is not so lyrical as imaginatively and elaborately idyllic. The shorter and more strictly lyrical poems, too, of William Browne and of Wither-who alone really succeeded in grafting a living shoot upon the pastoral stem of Spenser — are less derived from Spenser than from the more immediate models of Jonson or Campion. Yet Browne had, notwithstanding, a true lyric quality of his own, which entitles him to a place of respect; and, indeed, if we are to believe that he was actually the author of the famous Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke, so long attributed to Jonson, Browne has certainly succeeded for once in rivaling his master at that master's best.2 As to Wither whose verse, undistinguished from his poetry has long been painfully reprinting under the auspices of the Spenser Society (a task which indeed seems to have proved unhappily too much even for that long-lived association, and brought it of late to an untimely end), his heights and depths approach the heights and depths of Wordsworth; whilst his fecundity is no less amazing than his metrical facility. Would that we had one more lyric like the immortal "Shall I wasting in despair" for many pages of eclogues and satires, excellent although many of them undoubtedly are.

Lastly we reach William Drummond of Hawthornden, whose sonnets are entirely after the earlier manner, Italian, sentimental, romantic, but touched with a delicate medita

1 Cf. Browne's Song of the Siren, p. 167 below, with Campion's Hymn in praise of Neptune, Bullen's Campion, p. 396.

2 See the Epitaph, p. 201, and the note thereon.