fining itself into intellect, so that when we come to read the work of Shelley and Keats, or of the Brownings, or of the Rossettis, or of Patmore, or of Meredith, we find there a kind of truth and sincerity altogether different from the sincere but fantastic artificiality of the seventeenth century lyrists, or the grave insincerity of the poets of the eighteenth century. In those modern poets, weighed down, for all their boasted freedom and licence, by century after century of tradition, we find a very real sadness beyond anything to be found in our earlier literature outside the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Beginning with Wyatt (1503-1542), who has not yet received his due as the first modern English Poet, we find the Lyric, in which our Poetry is so incomparably rich, already of a perfect beauty, with an early freshness as of the dawn upon it, and with a certain indistinctness that belongs to the hour before the sunrise. If in the Earl of Surrey (1517-1546) a finer ear, a more subtle sense of rhythm may be discerned than in the more natural and human verse of Wyatt, it is yet to Wyatt rather than to Surrey that we shall return again and again, finding in his verse that personal note that may be heard in all English Poetry since his day; but that has grown, how wonderfully in intensity and strength, ever since. The influence of Italy and Italian work that has always been present in our literature, in Chaucer as in Wyatt and Surrey, in Spenser as in Milton, in Crashaw as in Byron and Browning and Rossetti and Swinburne, which to-day we feel so profoundly in the work of Dante for instance, has been as it were a shadow of the great classical ages over a land and a language which naturally had little or nothing of the temperance and order so characteristic of the old great masters. Everywhere I find Italian influence bringing with it a certain order and regularity into English work that, without it, might have produced in the translation of the Bible, for instance, a literature as uncouth and chaotic as the work of Walt Whitman, but that, under the guidance of the Latin genius, has given us an everlasting foundation of orderly beauty and strength which will endure for ever, and, together with the literature which has been built upon it, will remain the immortal monument of a great people when England must lie down with Greece and Rome. The sun of English Poetry that at last rose upon a world that might seem to have been composed all of beautiful cities and of the country was Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Profoundly influenced by the classical spirit that was just then so pedantically exultant at Cambridge (where Gabriel Harvey and Abraham Fraunce, whose names are enshrined in Spenser's work-while Fraunce has left us a fine poem in Hexameters called Emmanuel-carried away by the new-born enthusiasm for the classics and imperfectly understanding the genius of English, tried, not without a good hope of success, to force the Hexameter upon him ;) Spenser composed his own immortal stanza, escaping the calamity they sought to heap upon him, giving us in the Epithalamion the finest love song, irresistible, exultant, victorious, in the language. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586), the traveller, the lover of Stella, the beautiful and noble figure who died at Zutphen, did not so fortunately escape the pedantry of his day. Nevertheless his work remains exquisite in purity and strength. Thomas Lodge (1556 ?-1625), in whom we seem to discern here and there a faint suggestion of the earlier euphuistic manner of Shakespeare, has left us at least one perfect song in Rosalynd's Own Madrigal, while he, like Greene and Constable, seems to play with the spirit of the Renaissance as a child might play with a beautiful flame ignorant of its power and strength, conscious only of its beauty. And if in Daniel or Drayton we seem to find certain notes of the profound music of Shakespeare's Sonnets, it is rather as a far-away rumour of the splendour that will be, coming into the unconscious beauty and pleasure of early morning, than as anything which is really felt or understood in those years of sweet sounds. But with the advent of Marlowe (1564-1593) all is changed; an immense music has suddenly scattered the song of the birds, and at last the spirit of man, with a magnificent ease and strength, begins to speak as of old. With an energy and vitality never surpassed, he conceived and created the immortal English Line as splendid as the Greek or Roman, and in words that will live for ever proclaimed the advent of a third Literature. If all the pens that ever poets held Had fed the feeling of their masters' thoughts, And all combined in beauty's worthiness, And he was the herald of the king of kings. Marlowe wrote just before and just after the destruction of the Armada. Following that heroic victory we find one of the greatest periods of splendid literature in the history of the world. Inexplicable if he stood alone, as Schlegel has asserted, Shakespeare only becomes of a greater splendour and importance to us when we see him, not as a strange and miraculous isolated figure, but as the greatest of a mighty company of Tragic Poets and Dramatists. Born in 1564 and dead in 1616, within those few years he gave to England the greatest imaginative work of modern times. Born in the depths of that quiet and sober country that was before the foundation of any city, and that might seem to be the peculiar birthright of the English, the vitality and beauty of his early youth remain to us in the sensuous and lovely poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece ". Founded on Italian models they are splendid chiefly with youth. Of the plays, from the early euphuistic Comedies, in which woman is a doll and man too a kind of puppet full of perfect words, to the great series of Histories, the tremendous series of Tragedies, the exquisite and lovely Comedies, in which he seems to have sounded the heights and depths of life on every side, ignoring nothing save the religious temperament, who may now speak well? A whole literature has sprung up round his name, and not least round the Sonnets. A profound pessimism seems at one time to have possessed the greatest spirit of our race, and with a matchless music, following the earliest of our Sonneteers, Surrey, he has told us, with that inscrutable smile that has baffled every inquisitive critic, of his immense sorrow and scorn of a world ir which everything was passing away. Perhaps of al his work, the most beautiful, the most perfect part is the Sonnets. How far are we here from the euphuism of Sidney, or any of the great crowd of Sonneteers, oi of Shakespeare himself in youth? He seems to have pulled up life by the roots and cast it from him, and indeed, it was to a kind of solitude almost monastic that he suddenly retired after the production of "The Tempest" in 1613, reconciled at last to a continua. silence, allowing life and all the greatness and renown that he had known and understood, to slip away from him, till he died, a recluse in Stratford, in 1616. No was the company he left behind unworthy of him. Less than himself, but only less than he, that crowc of Dramatists, of Poets, led by Ben Jonson, continuec the splendid tradition through Beaumont and Fletcher and Ford and Webster and Dekker till it fell into ar exquisite decadence and died in Shirley. But the lovely unbroken song of the Lyric Poets had not beer interrupted by the great Dramatists, many of whom are among the first Lyric Poets of our land. Shake speare, in his unapproachable songs and the great over. ture to "The Two Noble Kinsmen "; Ben Jonson in many a perfect song; and Campion, in songs of a different manner, less artistically sincere, but mos musical and lovely, were, as it were, the leaders of a host of anonymous song writers whose verses, writter for the music of the lute or the clavichord, have happily come down to us. A more profound note is |