direction the thoughtfulness of the time issued in the directly religious verse of Herbert, Crashaw, Vaughan, and Quarles; writers whose fame in this century (we may observe in passing) curiously exemplifies the vagueness of popular estimate; the first having been justly valued, the last much overpraised; whilst Vaughan and Crashaw, in style so dissimilar, have alike failed to obtain their due share of study. We must find space for one pleasing specimen by the last-named, sent to a lady with Herbert's poems :

sacred

'Know you, Fair, on what you look ?
Divinest Love lies in this book,
Expecting fire from your eyes
To kindle this his sacrifice.

When your hands untie these strings,
Think you've an angel by the wings;
One that gladly will be nigh
To wait upon each morning sigh,
To flutter in the balmy air

Of your well-perfumed prayer.

These white plumes of his he'll lend you,
Which every day to heaven will send you
To take acquaintance of the sphere,

And all the smooth-faced kindred there.'

Meanwhile the Muses of England were learning modes of expression hitherto scarcely attempted. Comic songs and satire on subjects of the day, before almost confined to the drama, became the separate pursuit of Corbet, Suckling, Cartwright, Donne, and Jonson. And, as in the days of Horace, in connection with satire, appear poetical epistles (the first specimen of which is stated to be one given by Hall in 1613) on a vast variety of subjects. Few of these forms of poetry produced much that is valuable except historically, yet it would be an unjust opinion which, from the nature of their themes, ranked them below the narratives and pastorals, in which so much ordinary verse under Elizabeth displayed itself. Their aim indeed is less distinctly poetical; but their result was to bring poetry into vital connection with real life in all its phases; thus commencing those lessons of sobriety and simplicity in thought which the English mind so eminently needed. Even the rank luxuriance then displayed in the qualities most opposed to these-conceit and affectation-of which Johnson, in his Life of Cowley, has given excellent specimens, tended in the same direction. For the earlier conceits lie more in imaginative embroidery-those of Cowley, Donne, and Cartwright in fanciful and overstrained thought. By this change the disease reached the last stage of

its career, and, by seizing on the intellect rather than the imagination, worked itself out of poetry. Compare two imitations of Marlowe's well-known song:'Come live with me, and be my dear, And we will revel all the year

In plains and groves, on hills and dales,
Where fragrant air breeds sweetest gales.
There shall you have the beauteous pine,
The cedar, and the spreading vine,
And all the woods to be a screen,
Lest Phoebus kiss my summer's green.
The seat at your disport shall be
Over some river, in a tree,
Where silver sands and pebbles sing
Eternal ditties with the spring.

There shall you see the Nymphs at play,
And how the Satyrs spend the day,
The fishes gliding on the sands,
Offering their bellies to your hands.'
Sir W. Raleigh.

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasure prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines and silver hooks.
There will the river whispering run,
Warm'd by thine eyes more than the sun;
And there th' enamoured fish will play,
Begging themselves they may betray.
When thou wilt swim in that live bath,
Each fish, which every channel hath,
Will amorously to thee swim,
Gladder to catch thee, than thou him.

If thou to be so seen art loth

By sun or moon, thou darkenest both;
And if myself have leave to see,
I need not their light, having thee.'

Dr. Donne.

Here the fancies of Raleigh, his nymphs and satyrs, his summer's green' for the girl's complexion, and eternal ditties' for the spring, are all imaginative conceits and fallacies; Donne's the frostwork ingenuities of the intellect. Lodge's noble Description of Rosaline, glowing with the colours of Tintoret or Veronese, might be similarly compared with Cowley's Clad all in White.

Meanwhile, the imaginative and the passionate forms of our poetry show greater clearness and condensation. One specimen from Herrick, in whom the pastoralism of Elizabeth's age is united to closer natural description; one from Waller, in which the fancy of Sidney is united with a simplicity in which he is wanting, must suffice; nor indeed does this point seem to require more minute elucidation:

And having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.

On a Girdle.

That which her slender waist confined
Shall now my joyful temples bind;
No monarch but would give his crown
His arms might do what this has done.

It was my Heaven's extremest sphere,
The pale which held that lovely deer,
My joy, my grief, my hope, my love,
Did all within this circle move.

A narrow

A narrow compass! and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair:
Give me but what this riband bound,

Take all the rest the sun goes round!'

There is of course a sense in which it would be almost ludicrous to say that poetry such as this culminated in Milton. Between the art of English writers in general and that of Milton lies the most insuperable of human barriers-the immeasurable space between every other poetical gift and the gift of Sublimity. Nobleness is the rarest and highest imaginative excellence; it is also the most personal and incommunicable. Men like Phidias, Pindar, Tacitus, Dante, or Michelangelo, appear to have no ancestors and no successors. So with Milton: whatever the poetical cultivation of his countrymen, the way to one of the solitary thrones of excellence would, we cannot but think, have been infallibly trod by that imperial intellect. But we cannot here discuss the question how far minds of this order are independent of their age; nor point out how much, especially in what Milton gained from the ancients, is peculiar to him. What we wish rather to dwell on is the general fact, that in Milton's style is concentrated the best essence of the early poetry; music, manly strength and freshness, combined commonly with a directness and simplicity of language hitherto unattained; whilst the main feature of ancient style, as compared with modern-juxtaposition of thought and image with the view to effects of passion or vividness in picture is presented with a perfection and a nobleness of which the Divina Commedia ' had given the only earlier example to Christendom.

We had hoped to give this point full examination, but, in the phrase of Socrates, the Dæmon warns us' that there is risk of irreverence and error in the attempt to define the attributes of one among the Greater Gods. Let us conclude our task by remarking the splendid consummation of some special preexisting tendencies afforded by the author of 'Paradise Lost.' It is impossible to compare a short drama such as 'Comus' with the 6 sweetness long drawn out' of the 'Faerie Queen;' yet, where 'Comus' is allegorical, we think the allegory treated with more force and beauty than Spenser's; nor, his excepted, can any be named in rivalry. Admirable as are Virgil's early poems, yet it must be acknowledged that, since the days when Theocritus wrote his Thalysia,' pastoral poetry had produced nothing equal to 'Lycidas.' We have already classed the 'Allegro' and 'Penseroso' under the ancient descriptive style, in which the poet paints Nature as viewed by and in connection with man, not Nature

6

as

as she teaches and personifies herself in man. But these marvellous poems so far transcend all former attempts in description in any literature, that it is not surprising they should be popularly reckoned as rather the first works in the modern manner than (what we certainly think them) the glorified idea of the older. If any think this classification arbitrary, we would allow, as before stated, that no line can be drawn here with severity, and that Milton may be rightly placed last of the ancients, or earliest of the moderns; as the goal of one age is often the starting-point of the succeeding. But, in illustration of our own view, we will direct our readers to one contrast more; choosing our modern specimen from the too scanty and imperfect works of one who, if from the promise we may infer the fulfilment, would have ranked, had life been permitted to him, with the greatest poets of England. The pleasures of Imagination, Keats has been saying, transcend at times the enjoyments of reality: summer passes, but the pictures drawn by the imaginative memory are a consolation, when

The sear faggot blazes bright,
Spirit of a winter's night;

When the soundless earth is muffled,
And the cakèd snow is shuffled
From the ploughboy's heavy shoon;
When the night doth meet the noon
In a dark conspiracy

To banish even from her sky.
Sit thee there, and send abroad
With a mind self-overawed
Fancy, high-commissioned :-send her!
She has vassals to attend her:
She will bring, in spite of frost,
Beauties that the earth hath lost;
She will bring thee, all together,
All delights of summer weather;
All the buds and bells of May
From dewy sward or thorny spray;
All the heaped Autumn's wealth,
With a still, mysterious stealth:
She will mix these pleasures up
Like three fit wines in a cup,
And thou shalt quaff it :-thou shalt
hear

Distant harvest-carols clear;

Rustle of the reaped corn,

Sweet birds antheming the morn;
And in the same moment, hark!
"Tis the early April lark,

Or the rooks, with busy caw,
Foraging for sticks and straw.
Thou shalt, at one glance, behold
The daisy and the marigold;
White-plumed lilies, and the first
Hedge-grown primrose that hath burst;
Shaded hyacinth, alway

Sapphire queen of the mid-May;
And every leaf and every flower
Pearled with the self-same shower.
Thou shalt see the field-mouse peep
Meagre from its cellèd sleep;
And the snake, all winter thin,
Cast on sunny bank its skin;
Freckled nest-eggs thou shalt see
Hatching in the hawthorn-tree,
When the hen-bird's wing doth rest
Quiet on her mossy nest;
Then the hurry and alarm
When the beehive casts its swarm;
Acorns ripe down-pattering
While the autumn breezes sing.'

Now take the elder poet's work, not in the narrow spirit of rivalry with that of his youthful successor, but to note how, whilst in Keats the landscape consoles and absorbs the spectator (though deriving meanwhile its power from the subtle contrast between the variety of nature and the monotony of life), in Milton it is

the

6

the human element which gives its splendour to the grass, its glory to the flower;' how the later picture is more minutely and curiously true, the earlier the more equally balanced :——-'If I give thee honour due,

Mirth, admit me of thy crew;' &c.

which, though so well known, we can hardly refrain from quoting at length.

That the curious phases of the human mind, reflected in the poetry which we have thus imperfectly and briefly surveyed, might be brought with more vividness before the reader, we have ventured on quotations often long and sometimes familiar. But we think their length will not be regretted by those to whom they are best known; and such-and we hope there will be many such-we regard as our fittest audience.

ART. VI.-Plutarch's Lives. The Translation called Dryden's, corrected from the Greek and revised by A. W. Clough, sometime Fellow and Tutor of Oriel College, Oxford, and late Professor of the English Language and Literature at University College, London. In 5 volumes. 1859.

THE appearance of a new version-as in some sort this is--

of

of the Lives' of Plutarch, is not only a literary event, but one of no little historical importance. For Plutarch is not merely the first of biographers by right of having produced a great number of biographies of the first class, but he holds a position unique, peculiar, and entirely his own, in modern Europe. We have all 'naturalized' the old gentleman, and admitted him to the rights of citizenship, from the Baltic to the Pillars of Hercules. He was a Greek, to be sure, and a Greek no doubt he is still. But as when we think of a Devereux or a Stanley we call him an Englishman, and not a Norman, so, who among the reading public troubles himself to reflect that Plutarch wrote Attic prose of such or such a quality? Scholars know all about it to be sure, as they know that the turkeys of our farmyards came originally from Mexico. Plutarch, however, is not a scholar's author, but is popular everywhere, as if he were a native. It is as though the drachmas which he carried in his purse on his travels were still current coin in the public markets and Exchanges.

Now this, we repeat, is a unique phenomenon. There is no other case of an ancient writer-whether Greek or Latin-becoming as well known in translations as he was in the classical

world,