Command thefts, rapes, murder of innocents, The principal characters make as many invocations to the names of their children, their country, and their friends, as Cicero in his Orations, and all the topics insisted upon are open, direct, urged in the face of day, with no more attention to time or place, to an enemy who overhears, or an accomplice to whom they are addressed; in a word, with no more dramatic insinuation or bye-play than the pleadings in a court of law. Almost the only passage that I can instance, as rising above this didactic tone of mediocrity into the pathos of poetry, is one where Marcella laments the untimely death of her lover, Ferrex. "Ah! noble prince, how oft have I beheld Thee mounted on thy fierce and trampling steed, There seems a reference to Chaucer in the wording of the following lines "Then saw I how he smiled with slaying knife Wrapp'd under cloke, then saw I deep deceit Lurk in his face, and death prepared for me*." Sir Philip Sidney says of this tragedy: "Gorboduc is full of stately speeches, and well sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style, and as full of notable morality; which it doth most delightfully teach, and thereby obtain the very end of poetry." And Mr. Pope, whose taste in such matters was very different from Sir Philip Sidney's, says in still stronger terms: "That the writers of the succeeding age might have improved as much in other respects, by copying from him a propriety in the sentiments, an unaffected perspicuity of style, and an easy flow in the numbers. In a word, that chastity, correctness, and gravity of style, which are so essential to tragedy, and which all the tragic poets who followed, not excepting Shakespear himself, either little understood, or perpetually neglected." It was well for us and them that they did so! The Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates * "The smiler with the knife under his cloke." Knight's Tale. does his Muse more credit. It sometimes reminds one of Chaucer, and at others seems like an anticipation, in some degree, both of the measure and manner of Spenser. The following stanzas may give the reader an idea of the merit of this old poem, which was published in 1563. "By him lay heauie Sleepe cosin of Death A very corps, saue yeelding forth a breath. Of high renowne, but as a liuing death, So dead aliue, of life he drew the breath. The bodies rest, the quiet of the hart, And next in order sad Old Age we found, His beard all hoare, his eyes hollow and blind, His vitall thred, and ended with their knife There heard we him with broke and hollow plaint And all for nought his wretched mind torment, With sweete remembrance of his pleasures past, But and the cruell fates so fixed be, This one request of Ioue yet prayed he: That in such withred plight, and wretched paine, Had brought on him, all were it woe and griefe, And not so soone descend into the pit: Where Death, when he the mortall corps hath slaine, The gladsome light, but in the ground ylaine, But who had seene him, sobbing how he stood And knowes ful wel life doth but length his paine. Crookebackt he was, toothshaken, and blere eyde, John Lyly (born in the Weold of Kent about the year 1553), was the author of Midas and Endymion, of Alexander and Campaspe, and of the comedy of Mother Bombie. Of the last it may be said, that it is very much what its name would import, old, quaint, and vulgar.-I may here observe, once for all, that I would not be understood to say, that the age of Elizabeth was all of gold without any alloy. There was both gold and lead in it, and often in one and the same writer. In our impatience to form an opinion, we conclude, when we first meet with a good thing, that it is owing to the age; or, if we meet with a bad one, it is characteristic of the age, when, in fact, it is neither; for there are good and bad in almost all ages, and one age excels in one thing, another in another:-only one age may excel more and in higher things than another, but none can excel equally and completely in all. The writers of Elizabeth, as poets, soared to the height they did, by indulging their own unrestrained enthusiasm: as comic writers, they chiefly copied the manners of the age, which did not give them the same advantages over their successors. Lyly's comedy, for instance, is " poor, unfledged, has never winged from view o' th' nest," and tries in vain to rise above the ground with crude conceits and clumsy levity. Lydia, the heroine of the piece, is silly |