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The second song is also sung by Ariel and gives a hint of his nature and character.

GEORGE CHAPMAN

THE TWELFTH BOOK OF HOMER'S
ODYSSEYS

Pp. 145 f. At the time when Chapman made his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the study of Greek in England was still uncommon. Chapman's work is full of errors, but by its vigor and picturesqueness it has held its own until this day. It was greatly admired by Dryden, himself a good translator, and Dr. Johnson said that Pope constantly referred to it in making his version; but the same criticism that Bentley, the eighteenth century classical scholar, made of Pope holds, in a different way, of Chapman-"a very pretty poem but not Homer." Pope (cf. p. 290) is too abstract, too sophisticated, too regular, for Homer's simple concreteness and the big wave-movement of his hexameters. Chapman, on the other hand, although he is concrete, is not simple. His style is full of Elizabethan "conceits," highly compressed and unnatural figures of speech, as, for example, in describing the sirens' song in ll. 284285:

"This they gave accent in the sweetest strain That ever open'd an enamour'd vein."

In the simple translation of Butcher and Lang, this reads: "So spake they, uttering a sweet voice."

Chapman in his Iliad uses a fourteen-syllabled rhyming couplet which comes nearer to the big swing of the Greek hexameters than the tensyllabled couplet used in the Odyssey; but the longer measure also gave him more opportunity to get away from the plain directness of the original. Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, p. 478, shows, however, how profoundly the range and sweep of Chapman's translation impressed one who loved and knew fine poetry.

The Odyssey is an account of the adventures of Ulysses (Greek, Odysseus) and his companions, and later of himself alone, in his efforts to return to his home in Ithaca after the destruction of Troy, and of the means by which he punished the suitors of his wife and regained possession of his kingdom. Our selection tells how he managed to hear the fatal song of the Syrens and yet to escape in safety. He himself tells the story.

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SAMUEL DANIEL

Pp. 146 ff. Daniel's connection with the Sidney family he was tutor to the Countess of Pembroke's son, William Herbert, who became the third carl-probably explains his early venture into sonneteering. An unauthorized edition of some of his Delia sonnets appeared in the appendix to Astrophel and Stella, and the following year, 1592, the series of fifty-five was published, dedicated to Sidney's sister.

Daniel's sonnets are all on conventional themes, but his conceptions have individuality and his verse has dignity, sonority, and a fine rhythmical movement. No. XIX may be contrasted with Shakespeare's No. XCIX; No. LIV with Sidney's No. XXXIX and the others on the same topic; No. LV recalls to mind several of Shakespeare's.

EPISTLE TO THE LADY MARGARET,

COUNTESS OF CUMBERLAND

Pp. 147 f. Daniel was tutor from 1595 to 1599 to Lady Margaret's daughter, Lady Anne Clifford (born 1590). He fretted at having to "bide with children" when he wished to be trying lofty flights of verse, as Spenser, who thought highly of his work, had urged him to do.

This description of the state of a man strong in character and confident in his strength shows him at his best.

MICHAEL DRAYTON

Pp. 148 ff. Drayton tried his hand at most of the forms of verse popular in his day, and achieved more reputation than he has been able to maintain.

Many students of Shakespeare's sonnets believe that Drayton was the rival poet, "the proud full sail of [whose] great verse" Shakespeare mentions in sonnet LXXXVI. This belief is to some extent confirmed by a comparison of Drayton's sonnet XX with Shakespeare's CXXVII-CXLIV. Others think the rival poet to have been Chapman.

IDEA

XXXVII. Compare this with the sonnets on Sleep Daniel's and others. LXI. This is one of the most famous sonnets ever written; but it is admired probably as much for its appeal to common experience as for its beauty of expression.

ODE XII

To the Cambro-Britans and Their Harp,

His Ballad of Agincourt

Pp. 149 f. Cambro-Britans, the Welsh, whose national instrument was the harp. For the circumstances and leading figures of the battle of Agincourt, see Shakespeare's Henry V, especially III, v-vii, and IV.

1. 41. Poitiers (1356) and Cressy (1346), in which Henry's great-grandfather, Edward III, won amazing victories over the French, might well inspirit his men at Agincourt (1415).

1. 48. the French lilies. The French coat of arms was three fleurs-de-lys, often called lilies.

P. 150. 1. 113. St. Crispin's Day. October 25, the day of the twin saints, Crispinus and Crispinianus. See Henry V, IV, iii, 40–67.

NYMPHIDIA

The Court of Fairy

Compare Shakespeare's description of Queen Mab, Romeo and Juliet, I, iv, 53-69, and of Titania and her court, A Midsummer Night's Dream, II and III, i, 147–181. The influence of Shakespeare appears from ll. 150-152; but Drayton has borrowed no details, and his form is entirely different.

FRANCIS BACON

Pp. 150 ff. Bacon's essays are characterized by extraordinary compression of thought and richness of illustration. In reading them, it is necessary often to pause between sentences and to expand the thought in order to grasp the full meaning. Again, like all other writers to whom Latin was almost as familiar as English (notably Sir Thomas Browne and Milton, in this book), he uses words derived from the Latin with a significance not commonly given to them at the present day. For example, imposeth (p. 151 a) means "impresses itself as authoritative." For this reason, it is necessary to study his vocabulary with great care. His range of quotation and anecdote is very great, as will be seen from the following notes. His practice was, indeed, to jot down in a note-book whatever struck him as of special interest in his thinking or his reading, and these notes, classified by subjects and arranged in proper order, furnished nearly the whole frame-work of his essays.

On whatever subject Bacon is writing, his ideas

show the same mixture of observation and shrewd common sense. His ideals are all governed by considerations of practicability, and he is never carried off his feet by imagination or by any sort of enthusiasm.

I. OF TRUTH

P. 151 a. masks and mummeries and triumphs. The masques, disguisings, and other elaborate entertainments at court were usually given in the evening by artificial light.

vinum dæmonum. Many of the early Christians were opposed to Greek and Roman literature and especially poetry, not so much because it was fiction as because it celebrated the gods.

The quotation from Lucretius is in his poem De rerum natura, Bk. II, ll. 1 ff.; that from Montaigne in his Essais, ii, 18; the prediction at the end of this essay is from Luke, xviii: 8.

VIII. OF MARRIAGE AND SINGLE LIFE

P. 152 a. In the Odyssey, Bk. V, the nymph Calypso offers Ulysses immortality and eternal youth if he will remain with her. He refuses and returns to his old wife Penelope.

P. 152 b. A young man not yet. The saying is ascribed to Thales, one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.

XI. OF GREAT PLACE

Pp. 152 ff. Of the Latin quotations, the first is from a letter of Cicero's to his friend Marius; the second from Seneca's tragedy, Thyestes, 401403; the third is Bacon's Latinization of Genesis, i:31; the fourth and fifth from Tacitus's Historia, I, 49 and 50.

XVI. OF ATHEISM

Pp. 154 f. Of the Latin quotations, the first is from Diogenes Laertius, the Greek biographer of philosophers (X, 123); the second from a sermon by St. Bernard of Clairvaux; the last from one of Cicero's Orations.

P. 154 a. The Legend is doubtless The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), a collection of legends of the saints made by Jacobus de Voragine in the thirteenth century; the Talmud is a vast collection of stories, decisions, and sayings of Jewish rabbis; the Alcoran (or Koran) is the sacred book of the Mohammedans.

Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus, were Greek

philosophers who developed the atomic theory of matter. The four mutable elements are earth, air, fire, and water, of which, in Bacon's day, all things were supposed to be made. The immutable fifth essence (quintessence) was supposed to be an ethereal substance necessary to the existence of things and in a sense the soul of them. The theory which Bacon rejects is, in a modified form, that now dominant in science.

P. 154 b. Diagoras and Bion were Greek philosophers of the fifth and third centuries B.C.; Lucian was a Greek humorist and satirist (120?200? A.D.).

XXIII. OF WISDOM FOR A MAN'S SELF

P. 155 b. The setting of a house on fire to roast an egg may have suggested to Charles Lamb his amusing Dissertation upon Roast Pig.

P. 156 a. The deceitful weeping of the crocodile, reported by early travellers and naturalists, became proverbial in Shakespeare's day; cf. 2 Henry VI, III, i, 226.

Sui amantes sine rivali is loosely quoted from a letter of Cicero to his brother Quintus (III, 8, 4).

XXVII. OF FRIENDSHIP

The sentiment quoted in the first sentence is a modification of a statement by Aristotle: "He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god" (The Politics of Aristotle, translated by Jowett, I, i, 2).

falsely and feignedly. Bacon means that the stories told of them were not true. Epimenides was a Cretan Rip Van Winkle, who slept fifty years in a cave and came back with superhuman knowledge. Numa Pompilius, the second mythical king of Rome, retired into solitude to learn wisdom from the nymph Egeria. Empedocles threw himself into the crater of Ætna in order to seem to disappear like a god, instead of dying like a mortal. Apollonius of Tyana was an ascetic who was worshipped as a rival of Christ.

Pp. 157 ff. The stories of Pompey, Cæsar, and Themistocles are told by Plutarch in his lives of those men, and the parable of Pythagoras (p. 157 b) is also reported by Plutarch (in a Discourse on the Training of Children); the anecdotes of the Roman emperors are recorded by Suetonius (in his Lives of the Casars) and Dion Cassius (in his Roman History). The famous maxim of Heraclitus (p. 158 a) is recorded by Diogenes Laertius.

XLII. OF YOUTH AND AGE

P. 159. The first quotation is from the life of Severus in the collection of biographies of the Roman emperors known as the Augustan History; the second (English) is from Joel, ii: 28; the third is from Cicero's Brutus; and the last is a paraphrase of a sentence of Livy's History of Rome.

Cosmus Duke of Florence (1519-1574), better known as Cosmo the Great, belonged to the family of the Medici, famous for their wealth, their political power, and their patronage of literature and art. Gaston de Fois (or Foix), Duc de Nemours (14891512), was a brilliant young general; after a great victory at Ravenna, in 1512, he was killed while pursuing the enemy.

MINOR POETRY

SONG OF PARIS AND ENONE

P. 161. Elizabethan lyrics are of two kinds. One is the formal, elaborate sonnet, not set to music, sometimes a mere tissue of conventional sentiments expressed in highly artificial terms, but often built around a striking thought. The other is the song, madrigal, canzone, round, roundelay, etc., - which shows extreme variation in form, a minimum of thought, and a maximum of musical expression. In fact, the Elizabethan song is as near an approach to pure musical sound as has ever been made in words. Of this type no better example can be given than this roundelay (1. 11). It is sung by a man and a woman, first turn about and then together. With all the repetitions it contains more than forty lines and only sixty-two words.

Compare the lyrics taken from England's Helicon, pp. 162 ff., and the note on them.

FAREWELL TO ARMS

The occasion for this poem was the retirement of Sir Henry Lee from his office as queen's champion, November 17 (the anniversary of Elizabeth's coronation day), 1590. It was sung in a pageant presented before the Queen at Westminster. Sir Henry Lee, who had held his office ever since Elizabeth's accession, and who had come to be regarded as a model of knighthood, went through a ceremony of actually taking off his armor and putting on a civilian coat and cap, and then presented to the Queen his successor, the Earl of Cumberland.

1. 4. Youth (in years) wanes as youth (the young man) increases in age.

1. 10. age his alms, i.e., age's alms. A pedantic affectation common among Elizabethan writers, based on the mistaken idea that the possessive arose from a contraction of the noun and the masculine possessive pronoun.

THE BURNING BABE

Pp. 161 f. No poet ever expressed his life and personality more completely in a few words than Southwell in this poem. The fiery religious zeal that it shows brought him to martyrdom for his faith as a Roman Catholic. Ben Jonson said that he would willingly have destroyed many of his poems to have written The Burning Babe.

ENGLAND'S HELICON

Pp. 162 ff. The success of Tottel's miscellany in 1557 (see note on Wyatt and Surrey, p. 697) set the fashion for collections of lyric poetry. Tottel's book was in its eighth edition in 1587. The Paradise of Dainty Devices, published in 1576, was in its eighth edition when England's Helicon came out; and three other similar collections had also appeared before that time.

Undoubtedly the interest shown in lyric verse is to be associated with the great cultivation of music, which appears in the issue of song books by Byrd, Dowland, and other musicians, in the large use of songs in plays, and in the popularity of masques and pageants with musical accompani

ments.

The Elizabethan songs were all practical, that is, they were written to fit the measures of tunes and to make immediate appeal to the senses. Consequently the ideas in them are few and simple while the verse forms show infinite variety. Cf. note on Peele's Song of Paris and Enone, above.

England's Helicon is the best of the poetical miscellanies. It contains lyrics by Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, Greene, Lodge, Breton, Peele, the Earl of Surrey, Watson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, William Browne, and other well-known poets. Some songs are signed with initials, some with the pen-name "Shepherd Tony," many are marked Ignoto (unknown). Of the one hundred and sixty poems in the collection, more than fourfifths deal with the conventional shepherds and shepherdesses.

PHYLLIDA AND CORYDON

Sung before Queen Elizabeth, to her great delight, in the entertainment given her, in 1591, by the Earl of Hertford.

AS IT FELL UPON A DAY

Attributed to Richard Barnfield. It had been published twice before, once with music. Barnfield published in 1594 the sonnet series entitled Cynthia, dedicated to Penelope, Lady Rich, Sidney's "Stella."

PHYLLIDA'S LOVE-CALL

P. 163. ll. 15-17. Only a short time before, Queen Elizabeth had been presented with her first pair of knit silk stockings, and was immensely delighted with them.

1. 50. the golden ball, the apple of Discord given by the shepherd Paris to Venus as the most beautiful of the three goddesses. Cf. Gayley's Classic Myths, p. 285.

THE SHEPHERD'S DESCRIPTION OF LOVE

Signed S. W. R. (Sir Walter Raleigh) in the edition of 1600; but in the extant copies a slip on which is printed Ignoto is pasted over the initials.

DAMELUS' SONG TO HIS DIAPHENIA

P. 164. H. C. was probably Henry Constable, author of the sonnet series called Diana.

ROSALIND'S MADRIGAL

From Lodge's romance of that name (cf. p. 129).

THE PASSIONATE SHEPHERD TO HIS LOVE P. 165. Marlowe's only known song.

THE NYMPH'S REPLY Attributed to Raleigh, but without grounds.

THE END OF THE RENAISSANCE

THOMAS DEKKER

THE SECOND THREE MEN'S SONG

P. 166. 1. 12. Ring, compass, from an allusion of the year 1555 it seemingly means to form a circle. Perhaps there should be no comma after ring.

THE GULL'S HORNBOOK

Pp. 166 ff. Dekker's prose work is valuable chiefly for its vivid representation of contemporary life. His Gull's Hornbook is a sort of "Booby's Primer," ostensibly to teach a young man his way about town, incidentally but fundamentally to show up the follies and vices of the time. It is of course full of local hits and highly satirical.

P. 166 b. The Royal Exchange built by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1566-1567, and opened by Elizabeth in 1571, loomed so large in London life that the figure is very apt.

P. 167 a. throne . . . lord's room (place). The boxes were on each side of the balcony in which scenes in upper rooms were presented. Seats there were not so comfortable and did not give so good a view as a stool on the stage itself. Cambises. In a popular play of that name written by Thomas Preston before 1569.

Persian lock, a fashion affected by the longhaired gallants of the time.

a signed patent to engross the whole commodity of censure, a monopoly to control the market of criticism. A hit at one of the abuses of the time.

P. 167 b. a mere Fleet-street gentleman, i.e., one who lived between the merchants of the "city" and the nobility in the Strand, which was then the fashionable quarter.

P. 168 a. counter amongst the poultry, a pun. A counter was a debtor's prison. There were several of these in London. One stood in the street called Poultry (from the fact that it once contained a poultry market). Cf. the puns below on sculler and scullery (p. 168 b); on frets, troubles and marks on a musical instrument (p. 169); and on hogshead (p. 169).

P. 169 a. Arcadian and Euphuised gentlewomen. Dekker's hit shows how popular the works of Sidney and Lyly had become among women of rank.

BEN JONSON

Pp. 169 ff. Jonson is perhaps the earliest example in England of the all-round man of letters whose personal influence outweighed the critical judgment of his work by his contemporaries. Jonson did many things very well, nothing, perhaps, supremely well though it would be hard to better some of his lyrics; but because of his versatility and his power as a critic, he became the outstanding literary figure of his time. See Dryden's tribute, pp. 233 f.

TO THE MEMORY OF MY BELOVED, MASTER WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

These lines show that Jonson understood and appreciated Shakespeare as fully as any critic who has written about him. When a man who loved and imitated the classic drama could say that his contemporary equaled and surpassed ancient (ll. 31-54) as well as modern dramatists (ll. 27-30), the praise does honor to both. The tribute to Shakespeare's art (ll. 55-64), as well as to his natural gifts, is noteworthy as a corrective to the criticism that Jonson made of him on that ground in his Conversations with Drummond of Hawthorn den (Shakespeare Society Publications).

Cf. Matthew Arnold's sonnet on Shakespeare, p. 602.

JOHN DONNE

Pp. 171 f. Dr. Donne's peculiar qualities as a poet were intellectual and temperamental. He played with thoughts as his immediate predecessors played with concrete images. So doing, he initiated a new method, and his method was imitated by many so-called "metaphysical" seventeenth century poets, among whom must be numbered Wither, Quarles, Carew, Suckling, Lovelace, Marvell and Cowley. They wrote a few poems that will be remembered; but the trouble with most of them was that they insisted upon the playing even when they did not have the thoughts. Donne, with his restless, intense, subtle mind, was sincere, but the others were more or less affecting a mode which was not natural to them.

JOHN FLETCHER

SWEETEST MELANCHOLY

P. 173. Compare with the opening lines of l Penseroso, especially ll. 1, 2, 12, 31-36, 133-140, 67. and 74 of the latter. Note also the metrical resemblance: 1. 8-17 of Fletcher's poem are in the regular meter of Il Penseroso; the first lines of the two poems are identical in movement; while the opening and concluding lines of Fletcher's, taken together, may have suggested to Milton the form of his Introduction.

In Fletcher's day the cultivation of melancholy, as he describes it in these lines, was a fad of young men of fashion (cf. King John, IV, i, 15-17: and the melancholy Jaques in As You Like 11. The melancholy invoked by Milton is of an entirely different cast.

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