Nevertheless he concludes :

And yet therein I pray you, my good priests,
Pray still for me, and for my glass of steel,
That it nor I do anything offend,

Because we show all colours in their kind;
And pray for me that, since my hap is such
To see men so, I may perceive myself,
O worthy words to end my worthless verse;
Pray for me, priests, I pray you pray for me.

The Steel Glass reflects in the most vivid manner both the continuity of the reforming movement in religion, which had been supported by Wycliffe and Langland in the fourteenth century, and the active operation of the individual conscience in men, which was the great agent in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. This influence shows itself in an even more marked manner in two prose tracts by Gascoigne published in the same year as The Steel Glass, and entitled The Doome of Domesday and Delicate Diet for Dainty Mouthed Droonkards. It also reappears in his last poem The Grief of Joy, a satire on the vanity of man's life divided into four songs: "The Greeves or Discommodities of Lusty Youth," "The Vanities of Beauty," The Faults of Force and Strength," "The Vanities of Activities." Ten months after the appearance of this work the poet died on the 7th October 1577.

Without being a great poet Gascoigne is a representative English writer. He originated no fresh movement in metrical composition, but his active and robust intelligence enabled him to express clearly in verse the thoughts and feelings that were interesting his age. He called himself "Chaucer's boy and Petrarch's journeyman," but he was himself a master of the English language; and his metrical style is singularly free from those learned affectations and conceits to the fascinations of which many of his contemporaries fell easy victims. In his prose-writings he aimed at a different object, and we shall see in the next chapter how far he prepared the way for the extension of the literary movement which received its final impulse from the hand of John Lyly.

VOL. II

N

CHAPTER VII

COURT DIALECT: JOHN LYLY

As the civic structure of the State emerged from the halffeudal, half-ecclesiastical system of medieval Europe, and the idea of a community of nations, with rival aims and interests, began to take the place of the theory of a Universal Christian Republic, two predominant questions presented themselves in the sphere of imagination. One related to the ideal of conduct and manners which the knight, the inheritor of the old code of Catholic chivalry, should adopt in his capacity of courtier. The other was the refinement of the vulgar tongue into a fitting instrument for the various requirements of courtly conversation and literature. As we have already seen, Castiglione in Italy had dealt with the problem on both sides in the Cortegiano. In England it was treated under separate aspects both in poetry and fiction, in the Faery Queen, in the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and in Euphues. The two latter works form the starting-point of the modern novel. Both are written in prose, but prose of a kind, so closely associated with metrical composition and with the progress of English taste that it would be unphilosophical to regard them as beyond the limits of a history of English poetry. Pastoral Romance and Euphuism ought to be separately considered, and as the latter has the priority in point of time, I shall make it the subject of this chapter.

Euphuism was the form assumed in England by a linguistic movement which, at some particular stage of

development, affected every literature in modern Europe.
The process in all countries was the same, namely, to
refine the vocabulary and syntax of the language by
adapting the practice of early writers to the usage of
modern conversation. But the difficulty of the task in
each case varied according to the period at which the
experiment was first made. In Italy, for example, the
first country to employ the language in general use for
the purposes of literature, the work was comparatively
simple. Fortunate in the artistic instinct of her children,
Italy, even in the thirteenth century, had been able to
construct out of her numerous dialects what Dante calls
"The Illustrious Vulgar Tongue." "The Vulgar Tongue,"
says he, "of which we have been speaking has not only
been exalted by culture and authority, but it also exalts
its followers with honour and glory.
Now it appears to
have been exalted by culture, inasmuch as we have seen
it purified from so many rude Italian words, involved
constructions, faulty expressions, and rustic accents, and
brought to such a degree of excellence, clearness, com-
pleteness, and polish, as is displayed by Cino of Pistoia
and his friend in their Canzoni." Starting from the
vantage ground reached by Cino, it was easy for great
writers like Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to establish the
standard of the Italian language on clear and definite
principles.

Other countries, however, which were later in developing native genius, had to contend with greater difficulties. Spain resembled Italy Italy in the number of her dialects: the close of the fifteenth century arrived before the government of the whole Peninsula, brought under a single crown, caused the Castilian dialect to be accepted as the standard of the Spanish tongue. Perpetual struggles between rival races and religions, between Latinised Goth and Arab, between Christian and Moslem, retarded the promotion of the arts of civil life. Many forms of Spanish popular poetry existed; romances embodied in the favourite redondillas 1 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, chap. xvii. (Howell's Translation) p. 39.

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(trochaic measures); canciones or songs; villancicos, or rustic songs with refrains; but Spain had produced no great writers like Dante and Petrarch to invent, out of these primitive indigenous compositions, harmonious forms of art such as the sonnet or the canzone. Accordingly, when Naples became an appanage of the crown of Arragon, and intercourse with Italy was frequent, Spanish literature succumbed to the influence of foreign models. Not only did the first literary poets of United Spain seek to acclimatise Italian forms, but, as they naturally shared the Italian enthusiasm for the classics, they attempted at an early date to copy the style of the Latin poets, without consulting the characteristics of the ancient Spanish genius, which thus delayed to assert itself till the declining days of the monarchy, when it found its true form in the fiction of Cervantes and the dramas of Lope de Vega.

France also was long in finding out the bent of her literary capacity. Though like Spain she had produced instinctively many native forms of poetry, the songs of the Troubadours, the romans and fabliaux of the Trouvères, she too waited in vain for a great original genius to lay in these materials the foundations of a national literature. The long struggle between the Crown and its great vassals hindered the establishment of any ideal of patriotic unity, nor was it till the accession of Francis I. that the French Court became a centre for the encouragement of art and literature. Thus tardy in the refinement of their language the French yielded to the distracting influences, exerted simultaneously by the superior civilisation of their neighbours in Italy, and by the prestige of the Classical Renaissance. The first improvers of the national language made many mistakes as to the right road. Attempts were made in the reign. of Louis XII. to Latinise the vocabulary, a task in which the Universities had of course not been backward; these reached a climax of monstrosity in the dialect we find ridiculed by Rabelais. When the Limousin scholar meets Pantagruel the latter asks him: "Mon amy dond

viens tu a ceste heure? Lescholier lui respondist: De lalme, inclyte, et celebre Academye, que lon vocite Lutece. Quest ce a dire? dist Pantagruel a ung de ses gens. Cest (respondist il) de Paris. Tu viens doncques de Paris, dist il, et a quoy passez vous le temps, vous aultres messieurs estudians, ondict Paris? Respondist lescholier : Nous transfretons le Sequane on dilucule et crepuscule : nous deambulons par les compites et quadrivyes de lurbe, nous despumons la verbocination latiale, et comme verisimiles amorabondz, captons la benevolence de lomnijuge, omniforme, et omnigene sexe feminin."1

Clement Marot, revolting against this pedantry, turned with a right instinct to the old vernacular types of composition, and sought to frame from them a language suitable to the Court of Francis I. Marot's style is not wanting in grace and polish, but his was a genius without dignity; and dignity was the element that, in the reign of Henry II. Pierre Ronsard endeavoured to impart to the French tongue by naturalising in it the spirit of the ancient Greek poetry, then exciting the admiration of every scholar in Europe. Genius and enthusiasm enabled Ronsard occasionally to secure a measure of success in proportion to the nobility of his aims; but as a whole the movement he began was too purely literary to blend with the life of the nation; the scholar alone could derive pleasure from learned allusions to Greek gods and goddesses, or from Odes which, constructed like those of Pindar, were intended to be sung by the musicians of the Court. Nor, though Ronsard's aims were much more simple and rational than is often supposed, were he and "the Pleiad" very successful in their efforts to enrich the national vocabulary ; the pedantry of his successors, and especially Du Bartas, caused a reaction against his methods; so that though he really did much to refine the system of French versification, the poetical standard of the "Illustrious Vulgar Language" was not definitely determined till the time of Malherbe.

It will be seen that in France and Spain, countries 1 Rabelais, Book ii. chap. vi.