Halleck's New English Literature

[Illustration: BEN JONSON'S TOMB IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]

In 1616, the year in which Shakespeare died, Jonson was made poet laureate. When he died in 1637, he was buried in an upright position in Westminster Abbey. A plain stone with the unique inscription, "O Rare Ben Jonson," marks his grave.

Plays.—Ben Jonson's comedies are his best dramatic work. From all his plays we may select three that will best repay reading: Volpone, The Alchemist, and The Silent Woman. Volpone is the story of an old, childless, Venetian nobleman whose ruling passion is avarice. Everything else in the play is made tributary to this passion. The first three lines in the first act strike the keynote of the entire play. Volpone says:—

  "Good morning to the day; and next, my gold!—
  Open the shrine, that I may see my saint.
  Hail the world's soul and mine!"

The Alchemist makes a strong presentation of certain forms of credulity in human nature and of the special tricks which the alchemists and impostors of that day adopted. One character wants to buy the secret of the helpful influence of the stars; another parts with his wealth to learn the alchemist's secret of turning everything into gold and jewels. The way in which these characters are deceived is very amusing. A study of this play adds to our knowledge of a certain phase of the times. In point of artistic construction of plot, The Alchemist is nowhere excelled in the English drama; but the intrusion of Jonson's learning often makes the play tedious reading, as when he introduces the technical terms of the so-called science of alchemy to show that he has studied it thoroughly. One character speaks to the alchemist of—

"Your lato, azoch, zernich, chibrit, heautarit,"

and another asks:—

  "Can you sublime and dulcify? calcine?
  Know you the sapor pontic? sapor stiptic,
  Or what is homogene, or heterogene?"

Lines like the following show that Jonson's acute mind had grasped something of the principle of evolution:—

  "…'twere absurd
  To think that nature in the earth bred gold
  Perfect in the instant: something went before.
  There must be remote matter."

The Silent Woman is in lighter vein than either of the plays just mentioned. The leading character is called Morose, and his special whim or "humor" is a horror of noise. His home is on a street "so narrow at both ends that it will receive no coaches nor carts, nor any of these common noises." He has mattresses on the stairs, and he dismisses the footman for wearing squeaking shoes. For a long time Morose does not marry, fearing the noise of a wife's tongue. Finally he commissions his nephew to find him a silent woman for a wife, and the author uses to good advantage the opportunity for comic situations which this turn in the action affords. Dryden preferred The Silent Woman to any of the other plays.

Besides the plays mentioned in this section, Jonson wrote during his long life many other comedies and masques as well as some tragedies.

Marks of Decline.—A study of the decline of the drama, as shown in
Jonson's plays, will give us a better appreciation of the genius of
Shakespeare. We may change Jonson's line so that it will state one
reason for his not maintaining Shakespearean excellence:—

"He was not for all time, but of an age."

His first play, Every Man in his Humor, paints, not the universal emotions of men, but some special humor. He thus defines the sense in which he uses humor:—

  "As when some one peculiar quality
  Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
  All his affects, his spirits and his powers,
  In their confluctions, all to run one way,
  This may be truly said to be a Humor."

Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson gives a distorted or incomplete picture of life. In Volpone everything is subsidiary to the humor of avarice, which receives unnatural emphasis. In The Alchemist there is little to relieve the picture of credibility and hypocrisy, while The Silent Woman has for its leading character a man whose principal "humor" or aim in life is to avoid noise.

No drama which fails to paint the nobler side of womanhood can be called complete. In Jonson's plays we do not find a single woman worthy to come near the Shakespearean characters, Cordelia, Imogen, and Desdemona. His limitations are nowhere more marked than in his inability to portray a noble woman.

Another reason why he fails to present life completely is shown in these lines, in which he defines his mission:—

  "My strict hand
  Was made to seize on vice, and with a gripe
  Squeeze out the humor of such spongy souls
  As lick up every idle vanity."

Since the world needs building up rather than tearing down, a remedy for an ailment rather than fault-finding, the greatest of men cannot be mere satirists. Shakespeare displays some fellow feeling for the object of his satire, but Jonson's satire is cold and devoid of sympathy.

Jonson deliberately took his stand in opposition to the romantic spirit of the age. Marlowe and Shakespeare had disregarded the classical unities and had developed the drama on romantic lines. Jonson resolved to follow classical traditions and to adhere to unity of time and place in the construction of his plots. The action in the play of The Silent Woman, for instance, occupies only twelve hours.

General Characteristics.—Jonson's plays show the touch of a conscientious artist with great intellectual ability. His vast erudition is constantly apparent. He is the satiric historian of his time, and he exhibits the follies and the humors of the age under a powerful lens. He is also the author of dainty lyrics, and forcible prose criticism.

Among the shortcomings of his plays, we may specially note lack of feeling and of universality. He fails to comprehend the nature of woman. He is not a sympathetic observer of manifold life, but presents only what is perceived through the frosted glass of intellect. His art is self-conscious. He defiantly opposed the romantic spirit of the age and weakened the drama by making it bear the burden of the classical unities.

MINOR DRAMATISTS

Beaumont and Fletcher.—Next to Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, the two most influential dramatists were Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher (1579-1625). They are usually mentioned together because they collaborated in writing plays. Fletcher had the great advantage of working with Shakespeare in producing Henry VIII. Beaumont died nine years before Fletcher, and it is doubtful whether he collaborated with Fletcher in more than fifteen of the fifty plays published under their joint names.

Two of their greatest plays, Philaster and The Maid's Tragedy, are probably their joint production. The Faithful Shepherdess and Bonduca are among the best of about eighteen plays supposed to have been written by Fletcher alone. After Beaumont's death, Fletcher sometimes collaborated with other dramatists.

[Illustration: FRANCIS BEAUMONT.]

Almost all the so-called Beaumont and Fletcher plays are well constructed. These dramatists also have, in common with the majority of their associates, the ability to produce occasional passages of exquisite poetry. A character in Philaster speaks of death in lines that suggest Hamlet:—

  "'Tis less than to be born; a lasting sleep,
  A quiet resting from all jealousy;
  A thing we all pursue; I know besides
  It is but giving over of a game
  That must be lost."

Beaumont and Fletcher's work is noteworthy for its pictures of contemporary life and manners, for wealth of incident, rapidity of movement, and variety of characters.

Not long after the beginning of the seventeenth century there was a change in the taste of the patrons of the theater. Shakespeare declined in popularity. The playwrights tried to solve the problem of interesting audiences that wished only to be entertained. This attempt led to a change in dramatic methods.

Changed Moral Ideals.—Under Elizabeth's successors the Puritan spirit increased and the most religious part of the community seldom attended the theater. The later dramatists pay little attention to the moral development of character and its self-revelation through action. They often merely describe character and paint it from the outside. We have seen that Shakespeare's great plays are almost a demonstration in moral geometry, but Beaumont and Fletcher are not much concerned over the moral consequences of an action. The gravest charge against them is that they "unknit the sequence of moral cause and effect." After reading such plays, we do not rise with the feeling that there is a divinity that shapes our ends.

[Illustration: JOHN FLETCHER.]

Coleridge says, "Shakespeare never renders that amiable which religion and reason alike teach us to detest, or clothes impurity in the garb of virtue, like Beaumont and Fletcher." Much of the work of their contemporary dramatists is marred by such blemishes. Unpleasant as are numbers of these plays, they are less insidious than many which have appeared on the stage in modern times.

Love of Surprises.—The dramatists racked their inventive powers to introduce surprises to interest the audience. Here was a marked departure from Shakespeare's later method. He plans Macbeth so as to have his audience forecast the logical result. Consequences of the most tremendous import, beside which Beaumont and Fletcher's surprises seem trivial, follow naturally from Macbeth's actions. In his greatest plays, Shakespeare, unlike the later dramatists, never relies on illogical surprises to sustain the interest. The witch queen in one of the plays of Thomas Middleton (1570-1627) suddenly exclaims:—

"…fetch three ounces of the red-haired girl I kill'd last midnight."

Shakespeare's witches suggest only enough of the weird and the horrible to transfix the attention and make the beholder realize the force of the temptation that assails Macbeth. Charles Lamb truly observes that Middleton's witches "can harm the body," but Shakespeare's "have power over the soul."

Middleton could, however, write a passage like the following, which probably suggested to Milton one of the finest lines in Lycidas:—

  "Upon those lips, the sweet fresh buds of youth,
  The holy dew of prayer lies, like pearl
  Dropt from the opening eyelids of the morn
  Upon a bashful rose."

Large Number of Playwrights.—Beaumont and Fletcher were only two of a large number of dramatists who were born in the age of Elizabeth, and who, with few exceptions, lived into the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Their work was the result of earlier Elizabethan impulses, and it is rightly considered a part of the great dramatic movement of the Elizabethan age. The popularity of the drama continued to attract many authors who in a different age might have produced other forms of literature.

George Chapman (1559?-1634), who is best known for his fine translation of Homer's Iliad, turned dramatist in middle life, but found it difficult to enter into the feelings of characters unlike himself. His best two plays, Bussy D'Ambois and The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois, are tragedies founded on French history. Thomas Middleton, gifted in dramatic technique and dialogue and noted for his comedy of domestic manners, was the author of Michaelmas Term, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Changeling (in collaboration with William Rowley, 1585?-1640?). John Marston (1576?-1634) wrote Antonio and Mellida, a blood and thunder tragedy, and collaborated with Jonson and Chapman to produce Eastward Hoe, an excellent comic picture of contemporary life. The Shoemaker's Holiday of Thomas Dekker (1570?-1640) is also a good comedy of London life and manners. Philip Massinger (1584-1640), a later collaborator with Fletcher, wrote A New Way to Pay Old Debts, a play very popular in after times. Thomas Heywood (1572?-1650), one of the most prolific dramatists, claimed to have had "either an entire hand or at the least a main finger," in two hundred and twenty plays. His best work is A Woman Killed with Kindness, a domestic drama that appealed to the middle classes.

A Tragic Group.—Three dramatists: John Webster (1602-1624), Cyril Tourneur (1575?-1626), and John Ford (1586-1640?), had a love for the most somber tragedy. In tragic power, Webster approaches nearest to Shakespeare. Webster's greatest play, The Duchess of Malfi (acted in 1616), and The White Devil, which ranks second, show the working of a master hand, but Webster's genius comes to a focus only in depicting the horrible. He loves such gloomy metaphors as the following:—

         "You speak as if a man
  Should know what fowl is coffined in a baked meat
  Afore you cut it open."

Tourneur's The Atheist's Tragedy is in Webster's vein, but far inferior to The Duchess of Malfi.

Ford's The Broken Heart is a strong, but unpleasant, tragedy. He is so fascinated with the horrible that he introduces it even when it is not the logical outcome of a situation. His best but least characteristic play is Perkin Warbeck, which is worthy of ranking second only to Shakespeare's historical plays.

End of the Elizabethan Drama.—James Shirley (1596-1666), "the last of the Elizabethans," endeavored to the best of his ability to continue the work of the earlier dramatists. The Traitor and The Cardinal are two of the best of his many productions. He was hard at work writing new plays in 1642, when the Puritans closed the theaters. He was thus forced to abandon the profession that he enjoyed and compelled to teach in order to earn a livelihood.

The drama has never since regained its Elizabethan ascendancy. The coarse plays of the Restoration (1660) flourished for a while, but the treatment of the later drama forms but a minor part of the history of the best English literature. Few plays produced during the next two hundred years are much read or acted to-day. She Stoops to Conquer (1773), by Oliver Goldsmith, and The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777), by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, are the chief exceptions before 1890.

SUMMARY

The Elizabethan age was a period of expansion in knowledge, commerce, religious freedom, and human opportunities. The defeat of the Armada freed England from fear of Spanish domination and made her mistress of the sea.

England was vivified by the combined influence of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Knowledge was expanding in every direction and promising to crown human effort with universal mastery. The greater feeling of individuality was partly due to the Reformation, which emphasized the direct responsibility of each individual for all acts affecting the welfare of his soul.

Elizabethans were noted for their resourcefulness, their initiative, their craving for new experiences, and their desire to realize the utmost out of life. As they cared little for ideas that could not be translated into action, they were particularly interested in the drama.

Although the prose covers a wide field, it is far inferior to the poetry. Lyly's Euphues suffers from overwrought conceits and forced antitheses, but it influenced writers to pay more attention to the manner in which thought was expressed. The flowery prose of Sidney's Arcadia presents a pastoral world of romance. His Apologie for Poetrie is a meritorious piece of early criticism. While Hooker indicates advance in solidity of matter and dignity of style, yet a comparison of his heavy religious prose with the prayer of the king in Hamlet or with Portia's words about mercy in The Merchant of Venice will show the vast superiority of the poetry in dealing with spiritual ideas. Bacon's Essays, celebrated for pithy condensation of striking thoughts, is the only prose work that has stood the test of time well enough to claim many readers to-day.

Poetry, both lyric and dramatic, is the crowning glory of the Elizabethan age. The lyric verse is remarkable for its wide range and for beauty of form and sentiment. The lyrics include love sonnets, pastorals, and miscellaneous verse. Shakespeare's Sonnets and the songs in his dramas are the best in this field, but many poets wrote exquisite artistic lyrics.

Edmund Spenser is the only great poet who was not also a dramatist. His Faerie Queene fashions an ideal world dominated by a love of beauty and high endeavor.

The greatest literary successes of the age were won in writing plays for the stage. In England the drama had for centuries slowly developed through Miracle plays, Moralities, and Interludes to the plays of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. These three are the greatest Elizabethan dramatists, but they are only the central figures of a group.

The English drama in the hands of Sackville imitated Seneca and followed the rules of the classic stage. Marlowe and Shakespeare threw off the restraints of the classical unities; and the romantic drama, rejoicing in its freedom, speedily told the story of all life.

The innyards were used for the public presentation of plays before the erection of theaters in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. The theaters were a great educational force in Shakespeare's time. They not only furnished amusement, but they also took the place of periodicals, lectures, and books. The actors, coming into close contact with their audience and unable to rely on elaborate scenery as an offset to poor acting, were equal to the task of so presenting Shakespeare's great plays as to make them popular.

Shakespeare's plays, the greatest ever written, reveal wonderful sympathy, universality, humor, delineation of character, high moral ideals, mastery of expression, and strength, beauty, and variety of poetic form.

Great as is Ben Jonson, he hampered himself by observing the classical unities and by stressing accidental qualities. He lacks Shakespeare's universality, broad sympathy, and emotional appeal.

Other minor dramatists, like Beaumont and Fletcher show further decline, because they constructed their plays more from the outside, showed less development of character in strict accordance with moral law, and relied more for effect on sensational scenes. The drama has never since taken up the wand that dropped from Shakespeare's hands.

REFERENCES FOR FURTHER STUDY

HISTORICAL

In addition to the chapters on the time in the histories of Gardiner,
Green, Lingard, Walker, and Traill, see Stephenson's The Elizabethan
People, Creighton's Queen Elizabeth, Wilson's Life in
Shakespeare's England, Stephenson's Shakespeare's London, Warner's
English History in Shakespeare's plays.

LITERARY

General and Non-Dramatic

The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vols. IV., V., and VI.

Courthope's A History of English Poetry, Vol. II.

Schelling's English Literature during the Lifetime of Shakespeare.

Seecombe and Allen's The Age of Shakespeare, 2 vols.

Saintsbury's A History of Elizabethan Literature.

Dictionary of National Biography for lives of Lyly, Sidney, Hooker.

Bacon, Spenser, and the minor dramatists.

Walton's Life of Hooker.

Church's Life of Bacon. (E.M.L.)

Church's Life of Spenser. (E.M.L.)

Mackail's The Springs of Helicon (Spenser).

Dowden's Transcripts and Studies (Spenser).

Lowell's Among My Books (Spenser).

Erskine's The Elizabethan Lyric.

The Drama[30]

Schelling's Elizabethan Drama, 1558-1642, 2 vols. Ward's A History of English Dramatic Literature, 3 vols.

Brooke's The Tudor Drama.

Chambers's The Mediaeval Stage.

Allbright's The Shakespearean Stage.

Lawrence's Elizabethan Playhouse and Other Studies.

Smith's York Plays (Clarendon Press).

Symonds's Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama.

Bates's The English Religious Drama.

Manly's Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama.

Wallace's The Evolution of the English Drama up to Shakespeare.

Ingram's Christopher Marlowe and his Associates.

Dowden's Transcripts and Studies (Marlowe).

Symonds's Ben Jonson.

Swinburne's A Study of Ben Jonson.

Shakespeare

Lee's A Life of William Shakespeare.

Furnivall and Munro's Shakespeare: Life and Work.

Harris's The Man Shakespeare and his Tragic Life Story.

Halliwell-Phillipps's Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare.

Raleigh's Shakespeare.(E.M.L.)

Baker's The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist.

MacCracken, Pierce, and Durham's An Introduction to Shakespeare.

Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy (excellent).

Bradley's Oxford Lectures on Poetry.

Dowden's Shakespeare, His Mind and Art.

Coleridge's Lectures on Shakespeare (pp. 21-58 of Beers's Selections from the Prose writings of Coleridge).

Lowell's Shakespeare Once More, in Among My Books.

Wallace's Shakespeare, the Globe, and Blackfriars.

How Shakespeare's Senses were Trained, Chap. X. in Halleck's Education of the Central Nervous System.

Rolfe's Shakespeare the Boy.

Boswell-Stone's Shakespeare's Holinshed.

Brooke's Shakespeare's Plutarch, 2 vols.

Madden's The Diary of Master William Silence: A Study of Shakespeare and of Elizabethan Sport.

Winter's Shakespeare on the Stage.

THE DRAMA

The Best Volumes of Selections.—The least expensive volume to cover nearly the entire field with brief selections is Vol. II. of The Oxford Treasury of English Literature, entitled Growth of the Drama (Clarendon Press, 412 pp., 90 cents). Pollard's English Miracle Plays, Moralities, and Interludes (Clarendon Press, 250 pp., $1.90) is the best single volume of selections from this branch of the drama. Everyman and Other Miracle Plays (Everyman's Library, 35 cents) is a good inexpensive volume. Manly's' Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama (three volumes, $1.25 each) covers this field more fully. Morley's English Plays (published as Vol. III. of Cassell's Library of English Literature, at eleven and one half shillings) contains good selections from nearly all the plays mentioned below, except those by Shakespeare and Jonson. Williams's Specimens of the Elizabethan Drama, from Lyly to Shirley, 1580-1642 (Clarendon Press, 576 pp., $1.90) is excellent for a comprehensive survey of the field covered. Lamb's Specimens of English Poets Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare (Bohn's Library, 552 pp.) contains a large number of good selections.

Miracle Plays.—Read the Chester Play of Noah's Flood, Pollard,[32] 8-20, and the Towneley Play of the Shepherds, Pollard, 31-43; Manly's Specimens, I, 94-119; Morley's English Plays, 12-18. These two plays best show the germs of English comedy.

Moralities.—The best Morality is that known as Everyman, Pollard, 76-96; also in Everyman's Library. If Everyman is not accessible, Hycke-Scorner may be substituted, Morley; 12-18; Manly's Specimens, I., 386-420.

Court Plays, Early Comedies, and Gorboduc.—The best Interlude is The Four P's. Adequate selections are given in Morley, 18-20, and in Symonds's Shakespeare's Predecessors in the English Drama, 188-201. Pollard and Manly give several good selections from other Interludes.

Ralph Royster Doyster may be found in Arber's Reprints; in Morley's English Plays, pp. 22-46; in Manly's Specimens, II., 5-92; in Oxford Treasury, II., 161-174, and in Temple Dramatists (35 cents).

Gorboduc is given in Oxford Treasury, II. pp., 40-54 (selections); Morley's English Plays, pp. 51-64; and, under the title of Ferrex and Porrex, in Dodsley's Old Plays.

What were some of the purposes for which Interludes were written?
How did they aid in the development of the drama?

In what different forms are The Four-P's, Ralph Royster Doyster, and Gorboduc written? Why would Shakespeare's plays have been impossible if the evolution of the drama had stopped with Gorboduc?

Pre-Shakespearean Dramatists.—Selections from Lyly, Peele, Green, Lodge, Nashe, and Kyd may be found in Williams's Specimens. Morley and Oxford Treasury also contain a number of selections. Peele's The Arraignment of Paris and Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy are in Temple Dramatists. Greene's best plays are in Mermaid Series.

What are the merits of Lyly's dialogue and comedy? What might Shakespeare have learned from Lyly, Peele, Greene, and Kyd? In what different form did these dramatists write? What progress do they show?

Marlowe.—Read Dr. Faustus, in Masterpieces of the English Drama (American Book Company) or in Everyman's Library. This play may also be found in Morley's English Plays, pp. 116-128, or in Morley's Universal Library. Selections from various plays of Marlowe may be found in Oxford Treasury, 61-85, 330-356; and in Williams's Specimens, 25-34.

Does Dr. Faustus observe the classical unities? In what way does it show the spirit of the Elizabethan age? Was the poetic form of the play the regular vehicle of dramatic expression? In what does the greatness of the play consist? What are its defects? Why do young people sometimes think Marlowe the greatest of all the Elizabethan dramatists?

Shakespeare.—The student should read in sequence one or more of the plays in each of Shakespeare's four periods of development (pp. 185, 188), such as A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, for the first period; As You Like It and The Merchant of Venice, for the second; Hamlet and King Lear or Macbeth or Julius Caesar, for the third; and The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, for the fourth.

Among the many good annotated editions of separate plays are the
Clarke and Wright, Rolfe, Hudson, Arden, Temple, and Tudor editions.
Furness's Variorum Shakespeare is the best for exhaustive study. The
best portable single volume edition is Craig's Oxford Shakespeare,
India paper, 1350 pages.

The student cannot do better than follow the advice of Dr. Johnson: "Let him who is unacquainted with the powers of Shakespeare, and who desires to feel the highest pleasure that the drama can give, read every play, from the first scene to the last, with utter negligence of all his commentators… Let him read on through brightness and obscurity, through integrity and corruption; let him preserve his comprehension of the dialogue and his interest in the fable. And when the pleasures of novelty have ceased, let him attempt exactness and read the commentators."

Shakespeare's three greatest tragedies, Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth, should be read several times. After becoming familiar with the story, the student should next determine the general aim of the play and analyze the personality and philosophy of each of the leading characters.

After reading some of all classes of Shakespeare's plays, point out his (a) breadth of sympathy, (b) humor, (c) moral ideals, (d) mastery of English and variety of style, and (e) universality. What idea of his personality can you form from his plays? If you have read them in sequence, point out some of the characteristics of each of his four periods. Why is Shakespeare often called a great dramatic artist? How did his audience and manner of presentation of his plays modify his treatment of a dramatic theme?

Ben Jonson and Minor Dramatists.—The best plays of Ben Jonson, Chapman, Beaumont and Fletcher, Middleton, Massinger, Webster, and Tourneur may be found in Masterpieces of the English Drama edited by Schellinq (American Book Company). Selections from all the minor dramatists mentioned may be found in Williams's Specimens. The teacher will need to exercise care in assigning readings. Most of the minor dramatists are better suited to advanced students.

Read Jonson's The Alchemist or the selection in Williams's Specimens. A sufficient selection from Philaster may be found in Vol. II. of The Oxford Treasury, in Morley, and in Williams's Specimens.

What points of difference between Shakespeare and Jonson do you notice? What is his object in The Alchemist? Why is its plot called unusually fine? Wherein does Jonson show a decline in the drama?

Who were Beaumont and Fletcher? What movement in the drama do they illustrate? What are the characteristics of some other minor dramatists? What are the chief reasons why the minor dramatists fail to equal Shakespeare? When and why did this period of the drama close?

FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER IV:

[Footnote 1: For additional mention of Elizabethan novelists, see p. 317.]

[Footnote 2: For references to selections from all these prose writers, see p. 215.]

[Footnote 3: Of Youth and Age.]

[Footnote 4: Thomas Heywood's Matin Song.]

[Footnote 5: Suggestions for additional study of Elizabethan lyrics are given on p. 215.]

[Footnote 6: riding.]

[Footnote 7: An Hymne in Honour of Beautie.]

[Footnote 8: Faerie Queene, Book III., Canto 4.]

[Footnote 9: Ibid., Book I., Canto 3.]

[Footnote 10: Smith's York Plays.]

[Footnote 11: C.W. Wallace's The Evolution of the English Drama up to
Shakespeare.]

[Footnote 12: Wallace, op. cit., p.37.]

[Footnote 13: What We Know of the Elizabethan Stage.]

[Footnote 14: Performances were often given at night in private theaters. From the records in a lawsuit over the second Blackfriars Theater, we learn that there were in 1608 only three private theaters in London,—Blackfriars, Whitefriars, and a St. Paul's Cathedral playhouse, in which boys acted.]

[Footnote 15: This drawing of the Swan Theater, London, was probably made near the end of the sixteenth century by van Buchell, a Dutchman, from a description by his friend, J. de Witt. The drawing, found at the University of Utrecht, although perhaps not accurate in details, is valuable as a rough contemporary record of an impression communicated to a draftsman by one who had seen an Elizabethan play.]

[Footnote 16: The lease of the building for the first Blackfriars Theater, on Ludgate Hill, London, was taken in 1576 by Richard Farrant, master of the boys of Windsor Chapel, and canceled in 1584. In 1595 James Burbage bought a building for the second Blackfriars Theater, near the site of the first. This was a private theater, competing with the Globe, with which Shakespeare was connected. The chief dramatists for the second Blackfriars were Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston. James I. suppressed the second Blackfriars in 1608 because its actors satirized him and the French king. A few months later, Shakespeare and his associates assumed the management of the Blackfriars and gave performances there as well as at the Globe.

These facts explain Wallace's discovery that Shakespeare at the time of his death owned a one-seventh interest in the second Blackfriars, a theater that had formerly been a rival to the Globe.]

[Footnote 17: Dr. Faustus, Scene 6.]

[Footnote 18: Tamburlaine, Act II., Scene 7.]

[Footnote 19: The Winter's Tale, Act IV., Scene 4.]

[Footnote 20: Tradition says that Shakespeare occupied the desk in the farthest corner.]

[Footnote 21: Greene's Groatsworth of Wit, Grosart's edition of
Greene's Works, Vol. XII., p. 144.]

[Footnote 22: The contract price for building the Fortune Theater was £440.]

[Footnote 23: Adapted from Furnivall.]

[Footnote 24: Entered one year before at Stationers' Hall.]

[Footnote 25: May be looked on as fairly certain.]

[Footnote 26: Henry V., Act II., Scene 3, line 10.]

[Footnote 27: Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, p. 327.]

[Footnote 28: The Tempest, Act V., Scene 1.]

[Footnote 29: Ibid., Act I., Scene 2.]

[Footnote 30: For a list of books of selections from the drama, see p. 216.]

[Footnote 31: For full titles, see p. 6.]

[Footnote 32: For full titles of books of dramatic selections, see the preceding paragraph.]

CHAPTER V: THE PURITAN AGE, 1603-1660

History of the Period.—James I. (1603-1625), son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and the first of the Stuart line to reign in England, succeeded Elizabeth. His stubbornness and folly not only ended the intense patriotic feeling of the previous reign, but laid the foundation for the deadly conflict that resulted. In fifty-four years after the defeat of the Armada, England was plunged into civil war.

The guiding belief of James I. was that kings governed by divine right, that they received from the Deity a title of which no one could lawfully deprive them, no matter how outrageously they ruled, and that they were not in any way responsible to Parliament or to the people. In acting on this belief, he first trampled on the religious liberty of his subjects. He drove from their churches hundreds of clergymen who would not take oath that they believed that the prayer book of the Church of England agreed in every way with the Bible. He boasted that he would "harry out of the kingdom" those who would not conform.

During the reign of James I. and that of his son, Charles I. (1625-1649) a worse ruler on the same lines, thousands of Englishmen came to New England to enjoy religious liberty. The Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth in 1620. The exodus was very rapid during the next twenty years, since those who insisted on worshiping God as they chose were thrown into prison and sometimes had their ears cut off and their noses mutilated. In the sixteenth century, the religious struggle was between Catholics and Protestants, but in this age both of the contestants were Protestant. The Church of England (Episcopal church) was persecuting those who would not conform to its beliefs.

Side by side with the religious strife was a struggle for constitutional government, for legal taxes, for the right of freedom of speech in Parliament. James I. and Charles I. both collected illegal taxes. Finally, when Charles became involved in war with Spain, Parliament forced him in return for a grant of money to sign the Petition of Right (1628), which was in some respects a new Magna Charta.

Charles did not keep his promises. For eleven years he ruled in a despotic way without Parliament. In 1642 civil war broke out between the Puritans, on one side, and the king, nobles, landed gentry, and adherents of the Church of England, on the other. The Puritans under the great Oliver Cromwell were victorious, and in 1649 they beheaded Charles as a "tyrant, traitor and murderer." Cromwell finally became Protector of the Commonwealth of England. The greatest Puritan writer, John Milton, not only upheld the Commonwealth with powerful argumentative prose, but also became the government's most important secretary. Though his blindness would not allow him to write after 1652, he used to translate aloud, either into Latin or the language of the foreign country, what Cromwell dictated or suggested. Milton's under-secretary, Andrew Marvel, wrote down this translation.

[Illustration: CROMWELL DICTATING TO MILTON DISPATCHES TO THE KING OF
FRANCE CONCERNING THE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.[1] From the painting by
Ford Madox Brown.]

The Puritans remained in the ascendancy until 1660, when the Stuart line was restored in the person of Charles II.

The Puritan Ideals.—The Renaissance had at first seemed to promise everything, the power to reveal the secrets of Nature, to cause her to gratify man's every wish, and to furnish a perpetual fountain of happy youth. These expectations had not been fulfilled. There were still poverty, disease, and a longing for something that earth had not given. The English, naturally a religious race, reflected much on this. Those who concluded that life could never yield the pleasure which man anticipates, who determines by purity of living to win a perfect land beyond the shores of mortality, who made the New World of earlier dreams a term synonymous with the New Jerusalem, were called Puritans.

Their guide to this land was the Bible. Our Authorized Version (1611), the one which is in most common use to-day, was made in the reign of James I. From this time became much easier to get a copy of the Scriptures, and their influence was now more potent than ever to shape the ideals of the Puritans. In fact, it is impossible to estimate the influence which this Authorized Version has had on the ideals and the literature of the English race. Had it not been for this Version, current English speech and literature would be vastly different. Such words and expressions as "scapegoat," "a labor of love," "the eleventh hour," "to cast pearls before swine," and "a howling wilderness" are in constant use because the language of this translation of the Bible has become incorporated in our daily speech, as well as in our best literature.

The Puritan was so called because he wished to purify the established church from what seemed to him great abuses. He accepted the faith of John Calvin, who died in 1564. Calvinism taught that no earthly power should intervene between a human soul and God, that life was an individual moral struggle, the outcome of which would land the soul in heaven or hell for all eternity, that beauty and art and all the pleasures of the flesh were dangerous because they tended to wean the soul from God.

The Puritan was an individualist. The saving of the soul was to him an individual, not a social, affair. Bunyan's Pilgrim flees alone from the wrath to come. The twentieth century, on the other hand, believes that the regeneration of a human being is both a social and an individual affair,—that the individual, surrounded by the forces of evil, often has little opportunity unless society comes to his aid. The individualism of the Puritan accomplished a great task in preparing the way for democracy, for fuller liberty in church and state, in both England and America.

Our study of the Puritan ideals embodied in literature takes us beyond 1660, the date of the Restoration, because after that time two great Puritan writers, John Milton and John Bunyan, did some of their most famous work, the one in retirement, the other in jail. Such work, uninfluenced by the change of ideal after the Restoration, is properly treated in this chapter. While a change may in a given year seem sufficiently pronounced to become the basis for a new classification, we should remember the literary influences never begin or end with complete abruptness.

THE PROSE OF THE PURITAN AGE

Variety of Subject.—Prose showed development in several directions during this Puritan age:—

I. The use of prose in argument and controversy was largely extended. Questions of government and of religion were the living issues of the time. Innumerable pamphlets and many larger books were written to present different views. We may instance as types of this class almost all the prose writings of John Milton (1608-1674).

II. English prose dealt with a greater variety of philosophical subjects. Shakespeare had voiced the deepest philosophy in poetry, but up to this time such subjects had found scant expression in prose.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is the great philosophical writer of the age. In his greatest work, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, he considers questions of metaphysical philosophy and of government in a way that places him on the roll of famous English philosophers.

III. History had an increasing fascination for prose writers. Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World (1614) and Lord Clarendon's History of the Great Rebellion, begun in 1646, are specially worthy of mention.

IV. Prose was developing its capacity for expressing delicate shades of humor. In Chaucer and in Shakespeare, poetry had already excelled in this respect. Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), an Episcopal clergyman, displays an almost inexhaustible fund of humor in his History of the Worthies of England. We find scattered through his works passages like these:—

"A father that whipped his son for swearing, and swore at him while he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction."

[Illustration: THOMAS FULLER.]

Speaking of a pious short person, Fuller says:—

"His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing thereof."

Of the lark, he writes:—

"A harmless bird while living, not trespassing on grain, and wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly the ear with music."

Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, and it was not common until the first quarter of the next century.

V. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an Oxford graduate and physician, is best known as the author of three prose works: Religio Medici (Religion of a Physician, 1642), Vulgar Errors (1646), and Hydriotaphia or Urn Burial (1658). In imagination and poetic feeling, he has some kinship with the Elizabethans. He says in the Religio Medici:—

"Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common ears like a fable… Men that look upon my outside, perusing only my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above Atlas's shoulders… There is surely a piece of divinity in us—something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto the sun."

The Religio Medici, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die in."

Urn Burial, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a prose poet of the "inevitable hour":—

"There is no antidote against the opium of time… The greater part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found in the register of God, not in the record of man… But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal luster, not omitting ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature."

Browne's prose frequently suffers from the infusion of too many words derived from the Latin, but his style is rhythmical and stately and often conveys the same emotion as the notes of a great cathedral organ at the evening twilight hour.

VI. The Complete Angler of Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is so filled with sweetness and calm delight in nature and life, that one does not wonder that the book has passed through about two hundred editions. It manifests a genuine love of nature, of the brooks, meadows, flowers. In his pages we catch the odor from the hedges gay with wild flowers and hear the rain falling softly on the green leaves:—

"But turn out of the way a little, good scholar, towards yonder high honeysuckle hedge; there we'll sit and sing, whilst this shower falls so gently on the teeming earth, and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely flowers that adorn these verdant meadows."

[Illustration: IZAAK WALTON.]

[Illustration: JEREMY TAYLOR.]

VII. Of the many authors busily writing on theology, Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667), an Episcopal clergyman, holds the chief place. His imagination was so wide and his pen so facile that he has been called a seventeenth-century prose Shakespeare. Taylor's Holy Living and Holy Dying used to be read in almost every cottage. This passage shows his powers of imagery as well as the Teutonic inclination to consider the final goal of youth and beauty:—

"Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong texture of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece … and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces."

JOHN BUNYAN, 1628-1688

[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN. From the painting by Sadler, National
Portrait Gallery.]

Life.—The Bedfordshire village of Elstow saw in 1628 the birth of John Bunyan who, in his own peculiar field of literature, was to lead the world. His father, Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier, a mender of pots and pans, and he reared his son John to the same trade. In his autobiography, John Bunyan says that his father's house was of "that rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the land."

The boy went to school for only a short time and learned but little from any books except the Bible. The father, by marrying a second time within a year after his wife's death, wounded the feelings of his sixteen-year-old son sufficiently to cause the latter to enlist as a soldier in the Civil War. At about the age of twenty, Bunyan married, though neither he nor his wife had at the time so much as a dish or a spoon.

Bunyan tells us that in his youth he was very wicked. Probably he would have been so regarded from the point of view of a strict Puritan. His worst offenses, however, seem to have been dancing on the village green, playing hockey on Sundays, ringing bells to rouse the neighborhood, and swearing. When he repented, his vivid imagination made him think that he had committed the unpardonable sin. In the terror that he felt at the prospect of the loss of his soul, he passed through much of the experience that enabled him to write the Pilgrim's Progress.

Bunyan became a preacher of God's word. Under trees, in barns, on the village green, wherever people resorted, he told them the story of salvation. Within six months after the Restoration, he was arrested for preaching without Episcopal sanction. The officers took him away from his little blind daughter. The roisterers of the Restoration thought a brazier was too coarse to have feelings; yet Bunyan dropped tears on the paper when he wrote of "the many hardships, miseries, and wants that my poor family were like to meet with, should I be taken from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardship my poor blind one might undergo, would break my heart to pieces." In spite of his dependent family and the natural right of the freedom of speech, Bunyan was thrust into Bedford jail and kept a prisoner for nearly twelve years. Had it not been for his imprisonment in this "squalid den," of which he speaks in the Pilgrim's Progress, we should probably be without that famous work, a part of which, at least, was written in the jail.

In 1672, as a step toward restoring the Catholic religion, Charles II. suspended all penal statutes against the dissenting clergy; Bunyan was thereupon released from jail.

[Illustration: BEDFORD BRIDGE, SHOWING GATES AND JAIL. From an old print.]

After his release, he settled down to his life's work of spreading the Gospel by both pen and tongue. When he visited London to preach, it was not uncommon for twelve hundred persons to come to hear him at seven o'clock in the morning of a week day in winter.

The immediate cause of his death was a cold caught by riding in the rain, on his way to try to reconcile a father and son. In 1688 Bunyan died as he uttered these words, "Take me, for I come to Thee."

His Work.—Bunyan achieved the distinction of writing the greatest of all allegories, the Pilgrim's Progress. This is the story of Christian's journey through this life, the story of meeting Mr. Worldly Wiseman, of the straight gate and the narrow path, of the Delectable Mountains of Youth, of the valley of Humiliation, of the encounter with Apollyon, of the wares of Vanity Fair, "kept all the year long," of my lord Time-server, of Mr. Anything, of imprisonment in Doubting Castle by Giant Despair, of the flowery land of Beulah, lying beyond the valley of the Shadow of Death, through which a deep, cold river runs, and of the city of All Delight on the other side. This story still has absorbing interest for human beings, for the child and the old man, the learned and the ignorant.

Bunyan wrote many other works, but none of them equals the Pilgrim's Progress. His Holy War is a powerful allegory, which has been called a prose Paradise Lost. Bunyan also produced a strong piece of realistic fiction, the Life and Death of Mr. Badman. This shows the descent of a soul along the broad road. The story is the counterpart of his great masterpiece, and ranks second to it in point of merit.

[Illustration: BUNYAN'S DREAM. From Fourth Edition Pilgrim's
Progress, 1680.]

General Characteristics.—Since the Pilgrim's Progress has been more widely read in England than any other book except the Bible, it is well to investigate the secret of Bunyan's power.

In the first place, his style is simple. In the second place, rare earnestness is coupled with this simplicity. He had something to say, which in his inmost soul he felt to be of supreme importance for all time. Only a great man can tell such truths without a flourish of language, or without straining after effect. At the most critical part of the journey of the Pilgrims, when they approach the river of death, note that Bunyan avoids the tendency to indulge in fine writing, that he is content to rely on the power of the subject matter, simply presented, to make us feel the terrible ordeal:—

"Now I further saw that betwixt them and the gate was a river; but there was no bridge to go over, and the river was very deep… The Pilgrims then, especially Christian, began to despond in their minds, and looked this way and that, but no way could be found by them by which they might escape the river… They then addressed themselves to the water, and entering, Christian began to sink… And with that, a great darkness and horror fell upon Christian, so that he could not see before him…"

"Now, upon the bank of the river, on the other side, they saw the two shining men again, who there waited for them… Now you must note that the city stood upon a mighty hill; but the Pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them up by the arms; they had likewise left their mortal garments behind them in the river; for though they went in with them, they came out without them."

[Illustration:

  Let Badman's broken leg put check
  To Badman's course of evil,
  Lest, next time, Badman breaks his neck,
  And so goes to the devil.

WOODCUT FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF MR. BADMAN]

Of all the words in the above selection, eighty per cent are monosyllables. Few authors could have resisted the tendency to try to be impressive at such a climax. One has more respect for this world, on learning that it has set the seal of its approval on such earnest simplicity and has neglected works that strive with every art to attract attention.

Bunyan furthermore has a rare combination of imagination and dramatic power. His abstractions became living persons. They have warmer blood coursing in their veins than many of the men and women in modern fiction. Giant Despair is a living giant. We can hear the clanking of the chains and the groans of the captives in his dungeon. We are not surprised to learn that Bunyan imagined that he saw and conversed with these characters. The Pilgrim's Progress is a prose drama. Note the vivid dramatic presentation of the tendency to evil, which we all have at some time felt threatening to wreck our nobler selves:—

"Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way, and said, 'I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die; for I swear by my infernal den that thou shall go no further; here will I spill thy soul.'"

It would be difficult to find English prose more simple, earnest, strong, imaginative, and dramatic than this. Bunyan's style felt the shaping influence of the Bible more than of all other works combined. He knew the Scriptures almost by heart.

THE POETRY OF THE PURITAN AGE

Lyrical Verse.—The second quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed an outburst of song that owed its inspiration to Elizabethan lyrical verse.

Soon after 1600 a change in lyric poetry is noticeable. The sonnet fell into disfavor with the majority of lyrists. The two poets of greatest influence over this period, Ben Jonson and John Donne, opposed the sonnet. Ben Jonson complained that it compels all ideas, irrespective of their worth, to fill a space of exactly fourteen lines, and that it therefore operates on the same principle as the bed of Procrustes. The lyrics of this period, with the exception of those by Milton, were usually less idealistic, ethereal, and inspired than the corresponding work of the Elizabethans. This age was far more imitative, but it chose to imitate Jonson and Donne in preference to Shakespeare. The greatest lyrical poet of this time thus addresses Jonson as a patron saint:—

  "Candles I'll give to thee,
  And a new altar;
  And thou, Saint Ben, shall be
  Writ in my psalter."[2]

Cavalier Poets.—Robert Herrick (1591-1674), Thomas Carew (1598?-1639?), Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), and Richard Lovelace (1618—1658) were a contemporary group of lyrists who are often called Cavalier poets, because they sympathized with the Cavaliers or adherents of Charles I.

[Illustration: ROBERT HERRICK.]

By far the greatest of this school is Robert Herrick, who stands in the front rank of the second class of lyrical poets. He was a graduate of Cambridge University, who by an accident of the time became a clergyman. The parish, or "living," given him by the king, was in the southwestern part of Devonshire. By affixing the title Hesperides to his volume of nearly thirteen hundred poems, Herrick doubtless meant to imply that they were chiefly composed in the western part of England. In the very first poem of this collection, he announces the subject of his songs:—

  "I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers;
  Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
  I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes;
  Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes
       * * * * *
  I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
  The court of Mab, and of the Fairie-king.
  I write of hell; I sing and ever shall,
  Of heaven, and hope to have it after all."

His lyric range was as broad as these lines indicate. The most of his poems show the lightness of touch and artistic form revealed in the following lines from To the Virgins:—

  "Gather ye rose-buds while ye may:
  Old Time is still a-flying;
  And this same flower that smiles to-day,
  To-morrow will be dying."

His facility in melodious poetic expression is evident in this stanza from The Litany, one of the poems in Noble Numbers, as the collection of his religious verse is called:—

  "When the passing-bell doth toll
  And the furies in a shoal
  Come to fright a parting soul,
  Sweet Spirit, comfort me."

The lyric, Disdain Returned, of the courtier, Thomas Carew, shows both a customary type of subject and the serious application often given:—

  "He that loves a rosy cheek,
  Or a coral lip admires,
  Or from starlike eyes doth seek
  Fuel to maintain his fires,
  As old time makes these decay,
  So his flames must waste away."

Carew could write with facility on the subjects in vogue at court, but when he ventures afield in nature poetry, he makes the cuckoo hibernate! In his poem The Spring, he says:—

"…wakes in hollow tree
The drowsy Cuckoo and the Humble-bee."

In these lines from his poem Constancy, Sir John Suckling shows that he is a typical Cavalier love poet:—

  "Out upon it, I have loved
  Three whole days together;
  And am like to love three more,
  If it prove fair weather."

From Richard Lovelace we have these exquisite lines written in prison:—

  "Stone walls do not a prison make
  Nor iron bars a cage;
  Minds innocent and quiet take
  That for an hermitage."

To characterize the Cavalier school by one phrase, we might call them lyrical poets in lighter vein. They usually wrote on such subjects as the color in a maiden's cheek and lips, blossoms, meadows, May days, bridal cakes, the paleness of a lover, and—

"…wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink."

but sometimes weightier subjects were chosen, when these lighter things failed to satisfy.

Religious Verse.—Three lyrical poets, George Herbert (1593-1633), Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), and Richard Crashaw (1612?-1650?), usually chose religious subjects. George Herbert, a Cambridge graduate and rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury, wrote The Temple, a book of religious verse. His best known poem is Virtue:—

  "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
  The bridal of the earth and sky:
  The dew shall weep the fall to night;
    For thou must die."

The sentiment in these lines from his lyric Providence has the genuine Anglo-Saxon ring:—

  "Hard things are glorious; easy things good cheap.
  The common all men have; that which is rare,
  Men therefore seek to have, and care to keep."

Henry Vaughan, an Oxford graduate and Welsh physician, shows the influence of George Herbert. Vaughan would have been a great poet if he could have maintained the elevation of these opening lines from The World:—

  "I saw Eternity the other night,
  Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
  All calm, as it was bright."

Richard Crashaw, a Cambridge graduate and Catholic mystic, concludes his poem, The Flaming Heart, with this touching prayer to Saint Teresa:—

  "By all of Him we have in thee
  Leave nothing of myself in me.
  Let me so read my life that I
  Unto all life of mine may die."

His verse, like that of his contemporaries, is often marred by
fantastic conceits which show the influence of Donne. Although much of
Crashaw's poem, The Weeper, is beautiful, he calls the eyes of Mary
Magdalene:—

"Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans."

JOHN MILTON, 1608-1674

[Illustration: JOHN MILTON. After a drawing by W. Faithorne, at
Bayfordbury.]

His Youth.—The second greatest English poet was born in London, eight years before the death of Shakespeare. John Milton's father followed the business of a scrivener and drew wills and deeds and invested money for clients. As he prospered at this calling, his family did not suffer for want of money. He was a man of much culture and a musical composer of considerable note.

A portrait of the child at the age of ten, the work of the painter to the court, still exists and shows him to have been "a sweet, serious, round-headed boy," who gave early promise of future greatness. His parents, seeing that he acted as if he was guided by high ideals, had the rare judgment to allow him to follow his own bent. They employed the best teachers to instruct him at home. At the age of sixteen he was fully prepared to enter Christ's College. Cambridge, where he took both the B.A. and M.A. degrees.

[Illustration: JOHN MILTON, AET. 10.]

His Early Manhood and Life at Horton.—In 1632 Milton left Cambridge and went to live with his father in a country home at Horton, about twenty miles west of London. Milton had been intended for the church; but he felt that he could not subscribe to its intolerance, and that he had another mission to perform. His father accordingly provided sufficient funds for maintaining him for over five years at Horton in a life of studious leisure. The poet's greatest biographer, David Masson, says "Until Milton was thirty-two years of age, if even then, he did not earn a penny for himself." Such a course would ruin ninety-nine out of every hundred talented young men; but it was the making of Milton. He spent those years in careful study and in writing his immortal early poems.