of Norfolk in 1572; and in 1586, being a member of the Commission appointed to try Mary Queen of Scots, he was directed to convey to her the sentence of death, a painful duty which he discharged with so much respect and feeling as to earn the thanks of that unhappy sovereign. Shortly afterwards (1587) he was sent as Ambassador to the Low Countries to negotiate matters in dispute in consequence of the conduct of the Earl of Leicester, who was acting there as the Lieutenant-Governor for the Queen; but as Buckhurst was too upright and honourable to approve of all the favourite's actions he unfortunately incurred the displeasure of Elizabeth, who confined him to his house for a year. He was, however, soon restored to favour, and in 1591 received the Order of the Garter, while in the same year the University of Oxford made him its Chancellor. In 1599 he became High Treasurer, and in the following year presided at the trial of Essex. Created Earl of Dorset in 1604, he died in 1608, while sitting at the Council Table, and was buried at Withyham in Sussex. Looking to the series of State Trials in which Sackville took part, and the air of judicial gravity which seems to surround his character, the reader will find in his Induction and Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham-the poetical works of his youth-something strangely prophetic of his political career. Sombre, solemn, austere, the conception of these poems naturally provokes a comparison with the settled gloom of the Inferno, and it was probably this circumstance which led Pope-and afterwards Gray-to regard Sackville as a poet of the school of Dante. His actual poetical progenitors, however, were Virgil and Gavin Douglas. From the former he derived most of the details of his ideal scenery; he imitated the latter in associating the phenomena of Nature with the mournful events which made the subject of his poem, and with his own mood as their narrator; his manner of reproducing his borrowed materials is entirely his own. Douglas's impressive description of Winter prefixed to his translation of the Seventh Eneid, evidently inspired Sackville with the fine opening of the Induction : The wrathful Winter, 'proaching on apace, With chilling cold had pierced the tender green; The gladsome groves that now lay overthrown, The soil, that erst so seemly was to seen, Was all despoiled of her beauty's hue, And soote fresh flowers, wherewith the summer's queen The winter's wrath, wherewith each thing defast Hawthorn had lost his motley livery; Each thing methought with weeping eye me told Myself within; for I was gotten out Into the fields whereas I walked about.1 Sackville The melancholy aspect of the time causes the poet to moralise : And sorrowing I to see the summer flowers The sturdy trees so shattered with the showers, The fields so fade that flourished so beforne. It taught me well all earthly things be born To die the death, for nought long time may last; While the feeling of this stanza is identical with that which has been already noticed in Gavin Douglas, the course of the poem thus far resembles that which is employed by Lyndsay in his Dreme. But at this point the vast superiority of Sackville's imagination reveals itself. Instead of having recourse to the usual dream machinery, the sorrowful appearance of things and his own sorrowful mind conjure up the impersonation of 1 Sackville's Works. Edited by Hon. and Rev. Reginald Sackville-West, 2 Ibid. p. 99. P. 97. Sorrow, and the poet exerts all the powers of his fine invention to paint for the reader the figure he beheld : Her body small, forewithered, and forespent, And as the stone that drops of water wears, So dinted were her cheeks with fall of tears.1 : Sorrow, after some conversation with him, offers to guide him to a region where he may behold in outward form things hitherto merely imaged in his mind, and, taking the place of the Sibyl in Virgil, she conducts him amid scenery like that described in the Eneid to Avernus, through which they pass on till "first within the porch and jaws of hell" they encounter a group of Abstractions, some of whom have been enumerated by the Latin poet, but are now joined with others whom we recognise as the offspring of Catholic theology. Their names are, Remorse of Conscience, Dread, Revenge, Misery, Care, Sleep, Old Age, Malady, Famine, Death, War. All of these are portrayed by means of their attributes in a style which often reaches the sublime, but it will be sufficient to cite the description of Old Age : Crook-backed he was, tooth-shaken, and blear-eyed, When all these Abstractions have been described, the travellers pass on, like Æneas and the Sibyl, in Charon's ferry-boat into the region of departed spirits, where they encounter the shade of the Duke of Buckingham, who makes his complaint to Sackville in the same manner as the actors in the other tragedies address themselves to Baldwin. 1 Sackville's Works, p. 101. 2 Ibid. p. 113. Compared with Lyndsay's Dream and Complaint of the Papingo, the Induction of Sackville shows clearly the beneficial effects produced on English poetry by the genius of Surrey. Lyndsay's own poems are in some respects an advance on the art of his predecessors. While they are modelled on the allegorical forms peculiar to the Middle Ages, the poet is not content, like Dunbar in The Golden Targe, and Douglas in The Palace of Honour, with the treatment of a mere scholastic theme ; his moral is intended to suggest a remedy for actual evils; the cast of his thought, practical and satirical, is occupied with the fortunes of "John Commonweal," or the State. But he has no conception of conveying his instruction in a poetical form. The old conventional machinery of allegory is good enough for his purpose. He is satisfied with showing the reader the bare fact that bad popes, emperors, and kings are in Hell; when his Itinerarium Mentis has brought him within view of the realm of Scotland, he thinks only of classifying the evils he sees there; he is quite careless whether the speeches he puts into the mouth of his dying Papingo are appropriate to a bird, so long as he can deliver a shrewd stroke of satire at the abuses which move his indignation. Something of the same kind of rudeness is visible in Baldwin's and Ferrers' scheme for presenting the different tragedies in The Mirror for Magistrates. It is not so with the work of Sackville. He, too, makes use of the forms of allegory for the purposes of instruction. But with him the conception of the allegory is adapted to the ends of poetry. Everything in his action-the time, the place, the abstract character of the person-is made to conform to the ideal nature of the subject; the Induction is the work of a man who has moulded his materials according to the laws of art. Of the epic poets of England if Chaucer is the first to exhibit the genuinely classic spirit, Sackville is the first to write in the genuinely classic manner. A still more striking measure of the advance of English poetry since the improvements introduced by Surrey, is furnished by the diction and versification of Sackville in contrast with that of his predecessors. The English of Lyndsay is not a language, it is a dialect. The English of Baldwin and Ferrers, poets whose style had been formed under the old system, may be called a language in respect of vocabulary and syntax, but it is language which, never having been subjected to the rules of harmony and proportion, is rude, unbalanced, unrhythmical. In Sackville we find the art that is able to conceive alike effects of harmony as a whole, and that relation of the component parts to each other by which such effects are produced. The sustained music in the structure of the following stanza from The Complaint of the Duke of Buckingham, proceeds from a mind which is moved by a sense equally of the dignity of the subject matter, and of the metrical form in which this must necessarily clothe itself: And, Sackville, sith in purpose now thou hast What an interval between this and the versus inopes rerum of Churchyard! |