No More Learning

Yet far worse than his manifold intemperance, in the eyes of
his contemporaries, were his principles of morality and religion.
Evelyn found him a very profane wit,' and, doubtless, he took a
peculiar pleasure in shocking that amiable philosopher. Worse
than all, he was 'a perfect Hobbist,' and, upon his Hobbism, bis
glaring vices seemed but evanescent spots. He freely owned to
Burnet, with a smile, let us hope, that
though he talked of morality as a fine thing, yet this was only because he
thought it a decent way of speaking, and that as they went always in clothes
though in their frolics
they would have chosen sometimes to have gone naked,
if they had not feared the people, so though some of them found it necessary
for human life to talk of morality, yet he confessed they cared not for it.
As in prose, so in verse, Rochester delighted to outrage his critics.
Dryden charged him with self-sufficiency, and out of his mouth he
might have convicted him. Thus writes Rochester in An Epistolary
Essay:
Born to myself, I like myself alone;
And must conclude my Judgment good, or none :
For cou'd my Sense be nought, how shou'd I know
Whether another Man's were good or no.
14
E. L. VIII.
CH. VIII.


## p. 210 (#232) ############################################

210
The Court Poets
If then I'm happy, what does it advance
Whether to Merit due, or Arrogance ?
Oh, but the World will take Offence thereby!
Why then the World shall suffer for't, not I.
But it was not the world which suffered. It was Rochester. Like
all men who set out to astonish the citizen, to put the worst
possible construction upon his own words and acts, he saw his
self-denunciation accepted for simple truth. Even Dr Johnson
did not rise superior to the prejudice of Rochester's own con-
temporaries. He, too, thought that Rochester's intervals of study
were 'yet more criminal' than his course of drunken gaiety
and gross sensuality,' and thus proved how long endures the effect
of mystification
As has been said, it is difficult in the clash of opinions to
disengage the character of Rochester. Fort impie, fort ordurier
dans ses propos et ses écritssuch is Hamilton's judgment.
6
There has not livd in many Ages (if ever) so extraordinary, and I think I
may add so useful a Person, as most Englishmen know my Lord to have
been, whether we consider the constant good Sense, and the agreeable
Mirth of his ordinary Conversation, or the vast Reach and Compass of his
Invention
-80 says Wolseley, his loyal panegyrist. Somewhere between
these two extremes the truth will be found. Rochester was as
little 'useful' as he was fort impie, fort ordurier. He was a man,
not a monster, a man of genius, moreover, and, in his hours, a man
of rare simplicity and candour. A good friend, a kind, if fickle,
lover, he has left behind in his letters a better proof of his
character than either obloquy or eulogy affords. His correspond-
ence with Henry Savile does equal credit to them both. Rochester's
letters are touched with the sadness which underlay his mirth, yet,
what spirit is in them, what courage, even when he confesses him-
self almost blind, utterly lame, and scarce within the reasonable
Hope of ever seeing London again'l As sickness overtakes him,
he leans the more heavily on Savile's friendship.
‘Harry,' he writes, ''tis not the least of my Happiness, that I think you
love me; but the first of my pretensions is to make it appear, that I faith-
fully endeavour to deserve it. If there be a real good upon earth, 'tis
in the name of Friend, without which all others are fantastical. How few
of us are fit stuff to make that thing, we have daily the melancholy ex.
perience. '
His letters to his wife, moreover, exhibit us a Rochester that has
hitherto been obscured from view. Whimsical, humorous, ironic, he
9


## p. 211 (#233) ############################################

A Quarrel with Mulgrave 2II
appears in them also, but something else than the cynical hunter
after pleasure. He shows himself curious concerning the details
of household management. He discusses oats and coal, deplores
the want of ready cash, which is hard to come by, and hopes his
wife excuses him sending no money, 'for till I am well enough,' thus
he writes, 'to fetch it myself, they will not give me a farthing, and
if I had not pawn'd my plate I believe I must have starv'd in my
sickness. ' Here, indeed, is an unfamiliar Rochester, in dire straits
of poverty, pawning his plate to keep his restless soul within its
case, and nearer to the truth, perhaps, than the monster painted
in their blackest colours by anxious divines.
Two episodes in Rochester's career have involved him in
charges of dishonour, from one of which he cannot emerge with
credit. In both, Mulgrave was engaged, and it is easy to believe
that the antipathy which separated the two men was innate and
profound. When neither of them was of age, Mulgrave, being
informed that Rochester had said something malicious of him,
sent colonel Aston to call him to account. Rochester proved,
even to Mulgrave's satisfaction, that he had not used the words,
but Mulgrave thought himself compelled by the mere rumour to
prosecute the quarrel. He owned his persistence foolish, and
Rochester, as it was his part to choose, elected to fight on horse-
back. They met at Knightsbridge, and Rochester brought with
him not his expected second, but ‘an errant life-guards-man, whom
nobody knew. Aston objected to the second as an unsuitable
adversary, especially considering how well he was mounted. ' And,
in the end, they agreed to fight on foot. Whereon, Rochester
declared that ‘he had at first chosen to fight on horseback, because
he was so weak with a certain distemper, that he found himself
unfit to fight at all any way, much less on foot. Accordingly, no
fight took place, and Mulgrave's second lost no time in spreading
a report injurious to Rochester, upon whom henceforth was fostered
a reputation for cowardice. The charge is not fully sustained.
Rochester, it seems, was too weak to fight a-foot, Mulgrave objected
to fight on horseback, being worse mounted. A little ingenuity
might have turned the blame on either side, and Mulgrave, by
his own confession, was persisting in a quarrel which had no
justification. But Rochester, with his customary cynicism, shrugged
his shoulders, and replied to the charge of cowardice with a famous
couplet:
Merely for safety, after Fame they thirst,
For all men would be Cowards if they durst.
14_2


## p. 212 (#234) ############################################

2 1 2
The Court Poets
The origin of his quarrel with Dryden is by no means creditable
to his honour or his generosity.
'He had a particular pique to him, says Saint-Évremond, after his mighty
success in the Town, either because he was sensible, that he deserved not that
applause for his Tragedies, which the mad, unthinking audience gave him,. . .
or out of indignation of having any rival in reputation. '
Whatever might be the cause of Rochester's malice, its effect was to
set up Crowne in opposition to Dryden, a piece of impudence which
nothing but Rochester's influence at court could have carried off.
And no sooner had Crowne enjoyed his unwarranted success than
Rochester withdrew his favour, 'as if he would still be in contra-
diction with the Town, and in that,' says Saint-Évremond with un-
contested truth, 'he was generally in the right, for of all Audiences
in polite Nations, perhaps there is not one which judges so very
falsely of the drama. With this piece of injustice Rochester was
not content. If he had been, An Essay on Satire soon gave him,
as he thought, another ground of anger. That he should have
attributed this piece of weak and violent spite to Dryden speaks
ill of his criticism. He might have discerned the hand of Mulgrave
in every line. Perhaps he believed them accomplices. At any rate,
as Dryden was going home one night from Will's to his lodging,
he was waylaid by a pack of ruffians and soundly beaten. There
is no doubt that Rochester was guilty of the outrage. His guilt
stands confessed in a letter to Savile. "You write me word,' says
he, 'that I am out of favour with a certain poet. . . . If he fall on
me at the Blunt, which is his very good Weapon in Wit, I will
forgive if you please, and leave the Repartee to Black Will, with a
Cudgel. ' The punishment he meted out to Mulgrave was better
deserved, and delivered in verse. As for Dryden, whose genius, as
whose age, should have protected him, he passed by Rochester
with a single reference. ‘An author of your own quality, whose
ashes I will not disturb,' he wrote to Buckhurst, with a magnanimity
which, even at this distance of time, it is hard to condone.
At the age of thirty-one, Rochester died, his wild oats sown,
and his mind turned to ampler purposes. Though his cynical
temper was still unconquered, his wit began 'to frame and fashion
itself to public business. As one of his friends tells us, he was
‘informing himself of the Wisdom of our Laws and the excellent
Constitution of the English Government, and spoke in the House
of Peers with general Approbation. ' That he would ever have
grown into a statesman is unlikely. The scandal of his life had
destroyed his authority. Besides, he was a poet, to whom politics


## p. 213 (#235) ############################################

Rochester's Writings
213
would ever have seemed a base trade. What he did for the solace of
his reputation was to make an edifying end, and to prove a chance
of exhortation to two divines. That these worthy men made him
out rather worse than he was is probable. Burnet, at any rate,
told us something of him by the way and set forth his views with
impartiality. So much may not be said of the Rev. Robert
Parsons, who merely handed him over, as an inverted hero, to the
authors of the chapbooks.
Such was the life and death of one who set forth his character
in his writings with the utmost candour. Though he was never
at the pains to gather together his flying sheets, though he is said
on his deathbed, one hopes falsely, to have desired the destruction
of his poems, it is his poems which still give us the true measure
of his genius. Yet, even here, misunderstanding has pursued him.
The worst that he wrote has been acclaimed to be the best.
Johnson declares that the strongest effort of his muse is his poem
entitled Nothing', a piece of ingenuity, unworthy his talent Still
more foolish has been the common assumption that Rochester's
poems are unfit to be read. In some few, he reached a height of
outspoken cynicism rarely scaled by an English poet. But the
most of his works may be studied without fear, and judged upon
their very high merits. Tonson's collection contains more than 200
pages, and amply justifies the claim, made for it by Rymer, that it
consists of such pieces only as may be received in a virtuous court,
and not unbecome the Cabinet of the severest Matron. '
It was in satire above all that Rochester excelled. For this
kind, he was richly endowed by nature and art. He had studied
the ancient models with constancy and understanding. The
quenchless vigour of his mind found its best expression in cas-
tigating the vices and foibles of humankind, which he knew so
well. His daring and malice equalled his vigour, and he attacked
Charles II, the Royal Angler, or Nelly, the reigning favourite, with as
light a heart as he brought to the demolition of Sir Car Scroop, the
purblind knight. He wrote the heroic couplet with a life and
freedom that few have excelled, and the most that can be said in his
dispraise is that, like the rest of the courtiers, he knew not the use
of the file. 'Rochester,' said Andrew Marvell, with the voice not
of flattery but of criticism, 'is the only man in England who has
1 Nothing as a theme was long a commonplace. Johnson compares with Rochester's
verses Passerat’s Latin poem Nihil (1567). Two years before Passerat, Sir Edward
Dyer had written a tract in prose, The Prayer of Nothing, which had suggested a popular
broadside, with the same title, printed in J. P. Collier's Book of Roxburghe Ballads (1847).


## p. 214 (#236) ############################################

214
The Court Poets
8
the true vein of Satire,' and Marvell, in speaking of satire, spoke
of an art which he himself had practised with success. And that
Rochester looked upon satire as an art is evident from the answer,
which he gave to Burnet, who objected that revenge and false-
hood were its blemishes.
'A man,' said he could not write with life, unless he were heated with
Revenge, for to make a Satire without Resentments, upon the cold Notions of
Philosophy, was as if a man would in cold blood cut men's throats, who had
never offended him. And he said, the lyes in these Libels came often in as
ornaments that could not be spared without spoiling the beauty of the Poem. '
| His masterpiece, without doubt, is A Satire against Mankind.
Imitated from Boileau, it bears in every line the impress of
Rochester's mind. The energy of its thought and style separates
it sharply from its original, and, if you compare the two works, you
may find a clue to the difference between French and English.
The one is marked by order, moderation, and good sense. The
other moves impetuous like a torrent, and sweeps out of its way
the prejudices of all time. In cynical, closely argued contempt
of man this satire is unmatched; in expression, it surpasses the
most vivid of Rochester's works. The denunciation of reason,
an ignis fatuus of the mind,
Which leaves the light of Nature, Sense, behind,
is a purple passage of English poetry, in which the optimist can
take no delight. Its conclusion is the very quintessence of hope-
lessness.
The misguided follower climbs with pain
Mountains of Whimsies heaped in his own brain;
1
Then old Age, and Experience, hand in hand,
Lead him to Death, and make him understand,
After a Search so painful, and so long,
That all his life he has been in the wrong.
Like many of his contemporaries, Rochester followed Horace
in making verse a vehicle of criticism. His 'Allusion to the Tenth
Satire of the First Book' may be said to contain his literary
preferences. With candour and sound judgment, he characterises
the most eminent of his contemporaries. He declines to be
'blindly partial' to Dryden, defends Jonson and Shakespeare
against detraction, ridicules the 'tedious scenes' of Crowne,
whom he had used as the instrument of his jealousy, and detects
a sheer original in Etherege, who returned the compliment by
painting him as Dorimant. He finds the right epithets for ‘hasty
Shadwell' and 'slow Wycherley,' chooses Buckhurst for pointed


## p. 215 (#237) ############################################

Sir Charles Sedley
215
(
6
satire, and extols the 'gentle prevailing art' of Sir Charles Sedley.
For the uncritical populace, he expresses his frank contempt.
'I loathe the rabble,' says he, 'tis enough for me'
If Sedley, Shadwell, Sheppard, Wycherley,
Godolphin, Butler, Buckhurst, Buckingham
Approve my Sense, I count their Censure Fame.
It is Rochester's added distinction that, almost alone in his
age, he wrote lyrics touched with feeling, even with passion.
Though, at times, he makes sport of his own inconstancy, though,
like the rest, be rimes ‘kisses' with 'blisses' and 'heart' with
smart,' he could yet write
An Age in her Embraces past,
Would seem a Winter's Day;
or, still better, those lines to his mistress, which begin, 'Why dost
thou shade thy lovely face,' and which none of his fellows approached.
Here, the metre is as far beyond their reach as the emotion:
Thou art my Way: I wander if thou fly.
Thou art my Light: if hid, how blind am I.
Thou art my Life: if thou withdraw'st, I diel.
Nor should ever be forgotten that masterpiece of heroic irony
The Maim'd Debauchee, who, like a brave admiral, crawling to
the top of an adjacent hill, beholds the battle maintained, when
fleets of glasses sail around the board. ' You can but say of it, as
of much else, that it bears the stamp of Rochester's vigour and
sincerity in every line, and that he alone could have written it
Sir Charles Sedley, if he lacked Rochester's genius, was more
prosperously endowed. He was rich as well as accomplished, and
outlived his outrageous youth, to become the friend and champion
of William III. Born in 1639, he preceded Rochester at Wadham
college, and came upon the town as poet and profligate at the
restoration. Concerning his wit, there is no doubt. Pepys pays
it a compliment, which cannot be gainsaid. He went to the
theatre to hear The Maides Tragedy, and lost it all, listening to
Sedley's discourse with a masked lady "and a more pleasant
rencontre I never heard,' and his exceptions 'against both words
and pronouncing very pretty! Dryden describes Sedley as 'a more
elegant Tibullus,' whose eulogy by Horace he applies to him:
Non tu corpus eras sine pectore: Dii tibi formam,
Dii tibi divitias dederant, artemque fruendi.
He applauds above all the candour of his opinions, his dislike
of censoriousness, his good sense and good nature, and proclaims
the accusations brought against him as 'a fine which fortune
1 See appendix to second impression.


## p. 216 (#238) ############################################

216
The Court Poets
sets upon all extraordinary persons. It is certain that, with
'
the years, his gravity increased, and the quip which he made
to explain his hostility to James II, who had taken his daughter
for his mistress, and made her countess of Dorchester, was but an
echo of his lost youth. 'I hate ingratitude,' said he, 'the King
has made my daughter a countess; I can do no less than try to
make his daughter a Queen. '
As a poet, he followed obediently the fashion of the time.
He wrote The Mulberry Garden, which failed to please Pepys
or to provoke a smile from the king, and The Tyrant King of
Crete. He perverted Antony and Cleopatra into rime, and permits
the Egyptian queen to speak these last words:
Good asp bite deep and deadly in my breast,
And give me sudden and eternal rest. [She dies.
He translated Vergil's Fourth Georgic as well as the Eclogues,
and composed a poem on matrimony called The Happy Pair,
which was long ago forgotten. Such reputation as he has guarded
depends wholly upon his songs. What Burnet said of him might
be applied to them with equal truth: ‘he had a sudden and
copious wit, but it was not so correct as lord Dorset's, nor 80
sparkling as lord Rochester's. ' He had far less faculty than
either Rochester or Dorset of castigating his idly written lines.
He was content with the common images of his day, with the
fancy of Gradus ad Parnassum. The maids and shepherds of
his songs like their 'balmy ease' on 'flowery carpets' under the
e
sun's genial ray. Their only weapons are 'darts and flames. '
In the combination of these jejune words there can be no feeling
and no surprise. But Sedley had his happy moments, in which
he discarded the poor artifices of his muse, and wrote like a free
and untrammelled poet. Phyllis is my only Joy, apart from its
metrical ingenuity, has a lyrical sincerity which has kept it fresh
unto this day. Written to be sung, it is the work not of a fop
but of a poet. A near rival is ‘Not Celia that I juster am,'
memorable for its epigrammatic conclusion,
When Change itself can give no more,
'Tis easy to be true.
When he condescends to lyrical patriotism, Sedley is seen at his
worst. Not even his hatred of James II can palliate such doggerel as
Behold the happy day again,
Distinguish'd by the joy in every face;
This day great William's life began
Boul of our war and guardian of our peace.


## p. 217 (#239) ############################################

Buckhurst
217
6
For the rest, Rochester's criticism of Sedley is not without truth.
He praised the gentle Art,
That can with a resistless Power impart
The loosest wishes to the chastest Heart.
Sedley's early ambition could not be more justly or delicately
expressed
The reputation of Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and then
earl of Dorset, is a puzzle of literary history. An age lavish of
panegyric exhausted in his praise all its powers of flattery. In
no other poet will you find so vast a disproportion between his
works and the eulogies they evoked. Some specimens of Dryden's
adulation have already been quoted. And Dryden did not stand
alone. Prior was his friendly rival in exaggeration.
The manner in which he wrote,' said he of Buckhurst, will hardly ever
be equalled. . . . Every one of his pieces is an ingot of gold, intrinsically and
solidly valuable; such as wrought or beaten thinner, would shine thro' a
whole book of any author. '
For every virtue of his friend's writings Prior found a happy
image. There is a lustre in his verses,' he wrote, 'like that of
the sun in Claude Lorraine's landskips; it looks natural, and is
inimitable. ' And when we turn from the encomiasts to the poet's
own works, we find them to be no more than what Johnson called
them, the effusions of a man of wit, gay, vigorous, and airy. '
Buckhurst was, above all, a satirist. He had the mordant
humour, the keen eye, the perfect concision of phrase, essential to
one who lashes the follies of his age. He knew not how to spare
the objects of his contempt. He left upon his enemies not the
flicker of irony, but the indelible mark of his scorn. Rochester,
in a line of praise, not of ill-nature, as Dryden took it, called him
a
'the best good man with the worst natur'd Muse,' a line which
Buckhurst's addresses To Mr Edward Howard seem to justify.
Of their skill and energy, there can be no doubt. Their victim,
assuredly, found them deficient in good taste. "The gentleman,'
says Prior, ‘had always so much the better of the satirist, that the
persons touched did not know where to fix their resentments,
and were forced to appear rather ashamed than angry. ' It was
more anger than shame, I imagine, that attacked Edward Howard,
when he read Buckhurst's ferocious lines upon his plays.
The best known of all his works is the celebrated song, To all
you Ladies now at Land, a true ballad in form and rhythm,
touched in every line with the inborn wit and sentiment of its
author, who sees the sea with the eye of a landsman and courtier,
6
a


## p. 218 (#240) ############################################

218
The Court Poets
8
and who sends his tears a speedier way than the post: 'The tide
shall bring them twice a day. Tradition has persuaded the world
'
to believe that they were written at sea, in the first Dutch war,
1665, the night before an engagement' As Johnson says, 'seldom
any splendid story is wholly true,' and this splendid story must be
abandoned. The hereditary intelligence of the earl of Orrery
made Johnson suspicious, and today we have surer intelligence
even than lord Orrery.
‘By coach to my Lord Brunker's,' wrote Pepys on 2 January 1665, 'by
appointment, in the Piazza in Covent-Guarding; where I occasioned much
mirth with a ballet I brought with me, made from the seamen at sea to their
ladies in town. '
Though Pepys says that Sir W. Pen, Sir G. Ascue and Sir J.
Lawson
'made them,' it is evident that it is Buckhurst's 'ballet' that is in
his mind, and as Pepys knew it six months before the battle, clearly
Buckhurst did not write it at sea, with the expectation of an
engagement upon him. The time and place of its writing, how-
ever, do not lessen the admirable quality of the ballad, which keeps
its place in our anthologies by its own shining merits.
Nevertheless, not his ballad, not his satires, not his songs,
quick as they are with epigram and wit, justify the praises which
have been generously bestowed upon their author. It may be
that we have but a fragment of his work; that, as Prior suggests,
he cared not what became of his verses when the writing of them
had amused his leisure. Many of his happiest efforts may have
been preserved only by memory, like the sayings of the ancient
Druids. If that be so, they have perished as utterly as the Druids
and their wisdom. The mere rumour of them cannot affect our
judgment, and we are driven to conclude that it was Buckhurst
the man, not Buckhurst the poet, who won the universal esteem.
The follies of his youth were easily forgiven, or, rather, the excel-
lences of his maturer years showed the brighter with his follies for
a background. His character was as amiable as his pen was acrid.
Rochester, never lavish of compliments, paid him the highest that
ingenuity could devise. 'He did not know how it was,' said he,
'but my Lord Dorset might do anything, yet was never to blame. '
His skill in diplomacy, his tact in affairs, are acknowledged by all,
and he was evidently one of those who, without effort, claim and
keep the respect and affection of their fellows. Prior's eulogy of
his virtues is as sincere as it is eloquent, and if we estimate his
poetry more modestly than his contemporaries, we may still echo
their praises of his character and person.
>


## p. 219 (#241) ############################################

Mulgrave's Essay upon Poetry 219
8
It would be difficult to find a greater contrast to Buckhurst than
John Sheffield, earl of Mulgrave, and duke of Buckinghamshire,
who was as little able to hold the sympathy of his age as to preserve
the reputation of poet which once was his. Not even the tongues of
flatterers can defend him successfully against the assault of truth.
'He is a nobleman of learning,' wrote Macky, 'and good natural parts, but
of no principles. Violent for the High Church, yet seldom goes to it. Very
proud, insolent, and covetous, and takes all advantages. In paying his debts
unwilling; and is neither esteemed, nor beloved: for notwithstanding his
great interest at court, it is certain he has none in either House of Parliament,
or in the country'
The conduct of his quarrel with Rochester, and whatever else is
known of him, justify this harsh opinion. As a writer of verses,
he is fluent and undistinguished. His Temple of Death has no
better claim to be remembered than his Ode on Love. In The
Vision, which was written during a voyage to Tangier, we come
with surprise upon a line, 'odd antic shapes of wild unheard of
things,' which is not made up of current phrases, and echoes the
true sentiment of romance. His Essay on Satire, which cost
Dryden an encounter with Black Will, belies the principles
which he himself has set forth: the accent of the scold is heard
in every line. The work by which he is best known is An Essay
upon Poetry, a piece of rimed criticism, then fashionable. It is
neither profound nor original. Even as a chapter in the history
of criticism it is not valuable, because whatever of wisdom it
contains is borrowed from Boileau. It is full of commonplaces,
his own and others. 'Nature's chief masterpiece,' says he, 'is
writing well. Number and rime he finds 'but vulgar arts,' and
employed in vain without genius, 'for that's the soul. ' He dis-
courses, without illumination, of satires, songs, odes and epics.
As for dialogue, he finds that 'Shakespeare and Fletcher are the
wonders now, pays a lofty tribute to Homer-Read Homer once,
and you can read no more,' and in the second edition, published
nine years after the first, in 1691, puts Milton on the topmost
pinnacle of fame, above even Tasso and Spenser. This is the
highest feat of his intelligence, and he would have deserved still
greater credit for it, had not Roscommon anticipated him. In
general, he leans to the school of 'good sense'; he accepts Dryden's
definition of wit,'exact propriety of word and thought,' and would
judge poetry by a rigid standard of life. In condemning ‘such
nauseous songs as the late Convert made,' he voided his spleen
against his old enemy, Rochester, and suggested his dislike of the
sheer wit of restoration comedy. His condemnation inspired
0


## p. 220 (#242) ############################################

220
The Court Poets
name,
Robert Wolseley, in his preface to Valentinian (1685), valiantly to
defend the memory of his friend Rochester, and to strike a blow
for the freedom of poetry.
'It never yet came into any man's Head, who pretended to be a Critick,'
says Wolseley, "except this Essayer's that the Wit of a Poet was to be
measured by the worth of his Subject, and that when this was bad, that must
be so too; the manner of treating the subject has hitherto been thought the
true test, for as an ill Poet will depresse and disgrace the highest, so a good
one will raise and dignifie the lowest. '
Poetry, it may be assumed, was but an interlude in the life
of Mulgrave. Politics were always his chief employment, from
which he retired only while William III was on the throne. The
favourite of queen Anne, he held high office during her reign,
opposed the duke of Marlborough, ill requited the queen’s amia-
bility by inviting the princess Sophia to England, and built the
palace in the park, which, more than his works, keeps green his
Wentworth Dillon, earl of Roscommon, on the other
hand, meddled in the affairs of the court as little as he
practised its vices. Born in Ireland during the reign of
Strafford, his kinsman, he was given the name of that states-
man, who presently sent him to his own estate in Yorkshire to
be educated. He showed an aptitude for learning, and, as his
biographer says, 'attain'd to write in Latin with classical elegance
and propriety. When the blow fell upon Strafford, Roscommon
was sent to Caen to complete his education, and spent the
years of civil war in learning the life and language of foreign
countries, 'applying himself particularly to the knowledge of
medals, which he gained in perfection. ' He returned to England
at the restoration, a scholar, an honest man, and something of a
prig. He had but one vice, the unamiable vice of gambling, with
which he diminished his resources, and which once, in Dublin,
went near to cause his death. A friend of Dryden, he engaged
that great man's sympathy for his favourite project, the founding
of a British Academy which should 'refine and fix the standard
of our language. ' And the academic bent of his mind is seen in
his verses. His Essay on Translated Verse might well have been
an exercise presented to an academy of letters. It is tame, frigid
and uninspired. Johnson says he is the only correct writer of
verse before Addison,' a judgment which sets a strange meaning
upon correctness. The poets to whom Roscommon owes the
greatest debt are Horace, whom he says he has served more
than twenty years, and Boileau, whose apologue of the quack he
introduces into his poem without pertinence. The style of the


## p. 221 (#243) ############################################

Roscommon
22I
Essay never rises above a prosaic commonplace. It is only by
courtesy that we call such couplets as these poetry:
Provok'd too far, we resolutely must
To the few virtues that we have be just,
or
From hence our gen'rous Emulation came,
We undertook, and we perform'd the same.
The few precepts which he gives us would not prove of the
smallest use to the translator. They are little else than the plati-
tudes generally beloved by moral guides. Polonius himself might
have composed this specimen:
The first great work (a Task perform’d by few)
Is that yourself should to yourself be true.
He was as resolute a champion of 'good sense' as Rymer
himself, and he treats Homer with the same scant courtesy which
the author of A Short View meted out to Shakespeare:
For who, without a qualm, hath ever lookt
On holy garbage, tho' by Homer Cookt,
Whose rayling hero's, and whose wounded gods
Make some suspect, He snores as well as nods.
In the controversy between morality and art, he is strongly
ranged on the side of morality. “Want of decency is want of
sense,' says he in a line that Mulgrave pilfered. He shines most
• brilliantly in aphorisms, but he cannot sustain his wisdom; and
what most surprises us in An Essay on Translated Verse is its
reception. In Granville's eyes, he, with Mulgrave's aid, had en-
tirely eclipsed 'the Stagyrite and Horace. ' Henceforth, said this
too flattering critic, ‘we need no foreign guide. ' But let it not be
forgotten that Roscommon, before Mulgrave, discerned the genius
of Milton and the splendour of blank verse. His theory was
better than his precept. In his version of Ars Poetica, he
proved that, however deep might be his admiration of Milton, he
could not emulate the noble dignity of his style. Nevertheless,
the merit of one who, in 1684, dared to write blank verse, is not
that he uses it well, but that he uses it at all. Perturbed by the
religious strife which followed James II's accession to the throne,
Roscommon took the prudent resolution, says his biographer, 'to
pass the remainder of his life at Rome, telling his friends it would
be better to sit next to the chimney when the chamber smok'd. '
He did not effect his purpose. Overtaken by the gout, he died
suddenly, reciting as he died two lines of his own:
My God, my father, and my friend,
Do not forsake me at my End.


## p. 222 (#244) ############################################

CHAPTER IX
THE PROSODY OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
.
In the last summary of prosodic progress given in this work? ,
we saw how, with Spenser, something like a new era of English
versification was reached; how that versification was again adjusted
to the demands at once of metrical form and of the ear; how,
by Spenser himself, and by his contemporaries, “poetic diction'
of the best sort was once more constructed; and how, in short,
something like the Chaucerian position was once more attained,
but with the metrical forms immensely varied, and with these
forms adjusted to a condition of the language which has proved
relatively permanent.
Spenser died in the penultimate year of the sixteenth century,
Dryden in the last year of the seventeenth, and the period between
the two deaths witnessed large and definite prosodic progress : not
always in the limited and flattering acceptation of the word, but
always progress in the true historical sense. Many of the examples
and evidences of this—the dramatic blank verse of Shakespeare
and his elder and younger craft-fellows; the remarkable array of
later Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline lyric; the practical
creation of non-dramatic blank verse by Milton; the rival forms
of stopped and overflowing couplet—have been separately con-
sidered under the heads of the greater and lesser poets who
exemplified them. These particular considerations will only be
summarised here to the extent necessary for a general view of
the whole tendencies and results of the prosodic périod. But an
attempt will be made to map this out clearly; for, historically, if
we consider, there is hardly a more important field of English
versification in existence.
The point to start with, and to keep in mind as steadily as
possible, is that the effort to drag English prosody out of its
fifteenth century Slough of Despond—the effort begun by Wyatt
and Surrey, continued by Sackville and his contemporaries and
completed by Spenser-resulted, almost inevitably, in somewhat
I see ante, vol. in, chap. XII.


## p. 223 (#245) ############################################

Variations of the lambic Line
223
too great insistence on strict and nearly syllabic regularity of
metre. The elasticity and variety of English verse which had
been the most precious heritage from the union of Teutonic and
Romance qualities had been a little lost sight of, even to the
extent of the strange delusion-formulated as theory by Gascoigne
in the face of facts, and evidently entertained by much greater
and later poets in practice—that English possessed a foot of two
syllables, iambically arranged, and that foot only.
Had this delusion not been counterworked, the loss would have
been immense ; but, fortunately, the counterworking went on in
two—in fact in three-important directions. In the first place,
the abundant composition of songs for music necessitated now the
admixture, now the constant observance, of 'triple time. In the
second, metrical composition in this triple time, with no idea of
music, was popular; and, though not much affected by the greater
poets, it was sporadically cultivated by the lesser, from Tusser on-
wards. But the great instrument, pattern and storehouse (to
regard it from different points of view) in the recovery-slowly
though this recovery was effected—was blank verse.
It is one of the paradoxes frequent in prosodic as in other
history that this verse, in its origin and for some considerable
time, might seem to have been chosen as the very sanctum of the
foot of two syllables only. In Surrey, you will not find a trisyllabic
foot; except, and then rarely, by giving value to a syllable (such
as one or other of those in ‘spirit ') which was probably, if not
certainly, meant by the poet to be slurred-though it may improve
the verse to unslur it. So, in the rare fragments (such as
Gascoigne's Steele Glas) of other non-dramatic sixteenth century
work; and so, almost more, when the drama seized on blank
verse, or blank verse on the drama. The tramp of Gorboduc is
as unbroken as the ticking of a clock, as the 'rub-dub’-not yet
‘rub-a-dub'-of the drum to which it was early compared.
But it was impossible for a true dramatist who was also a true
poet to remain content with the single-moulded, middle-paused,
strictly iambic 'decasyllabon. Although this forms the staple
'
verse of Peele and Greene and Marlowe, occasional escapes of
passion break through the restraints in all directions, though the
trisyllabic foot is still very uncommon with them. But Shakespeare,
in a manner dealt with more in detail in the proper place, gradually
dispenses with all restraints not absolutely necessary to the reten-
tion of the general rhythm of the line. Only, perhaps, by reading
successively—with attention to the scansion-say, a passage of


## p. 224 (#246) ############################################

224 The Prosody of the Seventeenth Century
Gorboduc and one of the famous Hamlet soliloquies; and by
following up this pair with another-say, one of Turbervile's poems
and a song from Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, or
The Tempest-can anyone who has not deliberately studied prosody
appreciate the recovery of liberty in its process and in its fulfilment.
There will not be found any real 'irregularity'-lines of intended
similarity will never be observed to vary in 'accent' or 'foot
division'—whichever arrangement may be preferred. The blank
verse will sometimes extend itself to alexandrines, perhaps, in
a few cases, to fourteeners, and sometimes contract itself to
fragments (i. e. lesser multiples of the unit than five), which may
end with half, as well as whole, feet. The lyrics may-generally
will-present arrangements of different multiples. But these
multiples, in the lyric case, will be adjusted to a definite stanza-
symphony, and, in both cases, the individual correspondent lines,
though they may present syllabic difference, will be found to be
essentially equivalent-trisyllabic, occasionally monosyllabic, feet
(or accent groups) being substituted for dissyllabic? .
1 The actual opening lines of Gorboduc will do perfectly well, with the observation
that the rime of shame' and 'blame' is a mere accident, though rather an interest-
ing one, as showing that it was still difficult to avoid dropping into' this ornament
of poetry.
The sillent night | that brings | the quiſet pause,
From painful travails of the wea|ry day,
Prolongs | my careful thoughts / and makes / me blame
The slow | Aurore | that so I for love | or shame
Doth long | delay | to show | her blushſing face,
And now the day renews | my grief|ful plaint.
Here, every foot is dissyllabio and dissyllabio only: while there is hardly one, even
'Aurore' or '-vails of,' which is not, according to ordinary English pronunciation, a
pure iamb. And every line has five, and five only, of such feet without an eleventh
syllable, and even without a prosodic overrun, though there may be no stop in punc-
tuation, and even a connection in sense, at blame' and shame,' with the next verse.
Now take a Hamlet piece, observing that rearrangement of the lines, though in
some cases possible, will not affect the argument. For you will never get them into
exact decasyllabong. Neither will allowance of, or insistence on, slur help to bridge the
difference, for there is nothing in the Gorboduc passage like 'gen’ral' or 'ign'rant. '
For He cuba !
What's Hecuba | to him or he / to Hejcuba ?
That he should weep | for her? | What should be do,
Had he | the motive and the cure / for passion
That I have? He I would drown the stage / with tears,
And cleave the genſērăl eār | with hor/rid speech,
Make mad | the guilty and | appal | the free-
Confound the ig|nðrănt and amaze | indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.
Yet Il
and so forth. Here, you have a mode of procedure as different as possible. Even if any.
one objects to the alexandrine in 'What's Hecuba,' he will have to allow redundance
6


## p. 225 (#247) ############################################

Foot Equivalence and Stanza Variation 225
This instinctive carrying out, however, of the principles which
have been shown in previous chapters as at work since the
thirteenth century, at least, was not thoroughly understood by
any poet except Shakespeare. His contemporaries and successors
in lyric, with a few exceptions, though they fully compre-
hend line variety in length and the stanza symphony produced
thereby, did not venture on any large proportion of equivalence in
individual feet. And there was not any harm in this, for the
construction of their stanzas, with alternation of long and short
lines, was so intricate and varied that it almost produced the
effect of foot-substitution. But, in blank verse, the result of
insufficient understanding was more disastrous. They saw the
to the extravagant extent of three syllables ; even if, as pointed out above, he denies
the trisyllabic feet . . neral ear,' • . norant and,' preferring 'th' ignorant' or the
ign'rant' or some other monstrosity or cacophony, the racked or erased syllables will
still confront him. There is redundance which cannot be explained away in 'passion';
there is overrunning not merely of sense or grammar but in the whole rhetorical
prosodic cadence and complexion of the passage. And the fragmentary lines ‘For
Hecuba ' and · Yet I,' if this last be taken separately (and, if it be not, as in the folio, it
will make another alexandrine or another trisyllabic redundance), are perfectly regular
-two feet in the one case, one in the other.
Now to lyric. This piece of Turbervile
The green | that you did wish / me wear
Aye for your love
And on | my helm | a branch | to bear
1
Not to remove
Was evler you to have | in mind
Whom Cuſpid hath | my fere | assigned
is pretty enough ; but, if its grammar is rather poetically free, its metre is as prosodi.
cally strict and limited as possible. Once more, nothing but dissyllabic feet and, once
more, all those feet evidently intended for iambs—any doubt about 'Aye for and . Not
to' being removed by comparison with the other stanzas. Compare Ariel :
Where | the : bee | sucks : there suck I
In a : cow slip's : bell|I ; lie
There I : couch | when : Owls | do cry
On the : bat’s | back : do I : fly
Af|ter summer : merrily-
Merrily : merrily : shall | I live : now
Under the : blossom that : hangs | on the : bough.
Here, there are two possible ways of scansion indicated by the straight and
dotted lines respectively—the one representing iambio-anapaestic with anacrusis, the
other trochaic dactylio, but both far from the straight and direct iambio run. And
80 Amiens, in actually corresponding lines :
Who doth / ambi|tion shun),
strict iambs ; but
And loves to lie | 7 the sun |
with anapaest substituted in one place.
It is only necessary to add that an objection sometimes made, Oh! but these are
different tunes,' is quite beside the mark. The tunes may have been instrumental in
suggesting prosodic arrangements; but the difference of the arrangements themselves
remains.
E. L. VIII.
CH. Y
15


## p. 226 (#248) ############################################

226 The Prosody of the Seventeenth Century
6
writing everywhere on the wall, ‘Be bold I': they omitted to
notice the single warning, ‘Be not too bold ! '
The first excess of audacity was in the direction of the re-
dundant syllable. This, the occasional virtue of which had been
understood even by the Marlowe group, and was perfectly utilised
by Shakespeare, was carried, even by him, in his latest plays,
dangerously near, though never quite over, the limit. Whether
the similar exaggeration by Beaumont and Fletcher was original
or imitated—whether it preceded or followed Cymbeline, The
Winter's Tale and The Tempest—is a controversial point, and,
therefore, not to be treated at length or positively pronounced on
as matter of fact here. The opinion of the present writer is in
favour of imitation and following on the part of the twins. '
But the added exaggeration of redundance, though it pleases
different people differently when largely used, can hardly be
regarded as inconsistent with the retention of a sound standard
of blank verse in at least the dramatic variety. It is otherwise
with careless and exaggerated handling of the other means of
varying the measure-alteration of line length, shift or neglect of
pause and substitution of syllable groups. By neglecting to keep
the normal standard at least present in the background, so far as
these alterations are concerned, blank verse, already deprived of
the guard of rime, simply tumbles to pieces. It actually does so in
the work of D'Avenant, of Suckling and of not a few lesser men,
in the last fifteen or twenty years before the closing of the theatres.
No wonder that, after the restoration, we find it for a time losing
hold of the drama itself; and stigmatised as 'too mean for a copy
of verses' outside drama. The real wonder is at the magnificent
audacity of Milton in experimenting with it for dramatic or semi-
dramatic purposes so early as the date of Comus (actually after
D'Avenant's Albovine, if before Suckling's A glaura) and in choosing
it (exactly how much later is unknown) for the vehicle of Paradise
Lost. But this is to anticipate. There is much to be said of early
seventeenth century prosody before Milton and in the days when
he was writing but little verse. Especially, we have to deal with
the resurgence and (after some vicissitudes) establishment of the
decasyllabic couplet.
This couplet, it has been said, had been comparatively little
practised in the fifteenth and the greater part of the sixteenth
century. Except Dunbar, or whoever was the actual author of
The Freiris of Berwik, no one had got a real grip of it before
Spenser in Mother Hubber's Tale. But Drayton practised it


## p. 227 (#249) ############################################

The Decasyllabic Couplet
227
6
early in a form like Chaucer's own, neither definitely 'stopped'
nor definitely ‘enjambed'; and a phrase of his in prose, “the
attraction of the gemell'[twin) or 'geminell'(as he elsewhere calls
it), combines with Jonson's exaltation of it (transmitted to us by
Drummond) as an important tell-tale. The effect of the closing
couplets of Fairfax's Tasso is also attested in prose by Dryden on
the direct authority of Waller. But, earlier than Fairfax, Marlowe,
in Hero and Leander, had set the example, in extraordinarily
attractive form and matter, of the overlapped kind; and, on the
whole, this was preferred in the first half of the century. The
chief practitioners of it in the first quarter were Browne, Wither
and, perhaps, the enigmatic Chalkhill; in the second, Shakerley
Marmion and William Chamberlayne.
This variety has many attractions, evident even in these earl
examples, and fully developed later by Keats and William Morris.
So far as the subject goes, its superiority for narrative hardly
requires demonstration, The narrator acquires almost the full
liberty of prose in regard to the shortening and lengthening of his
sentences and to their adjustment in convenient paragraphs. He
need neither 'pad' in order to spread the sense into a couplet, nor
break the sense up in order not to exceed the two lines. His rime
is not intrusive or insistent; it neither teases nor interrupts.
On the other hand, the form provides him with all the additional
enticements of poetry, rhythm, rime itself as an agreeable ac-
companiment, the advantage of a more coloured and abundant
diction, the added ornament of simile and other poetic figure.
Unfortunately, as in the case of the freer blank verse, these
very advantages involve great temptations and great dangers,
of which some fuller account will be found in the chapter on the
lesser Caroline poets! The absence of restraint on sentence
construction leads to confused and inconsecutive writing, which, in
its turn, does almost more harm to the story than the power of
varying sentence length and of jointing sentences together does
good. But this is not all: the verse itself suffers, as verse. The
rime, if it escapes the danger of excessive prominence, incurs that
of being simply merged in the flow of overlapping lines. This
means that it also loses the power of fulfilling its function as
time-beater,' and that the individual line becomes flaccid and
imperfect in ictus. In fact, a general slovenliness comes over it;
and, whether by accident or definite causation, no chapter of
English poetry is more remarkable than this for ugly contractions,
i See vol. vir, chap. IV.
1542


## p. 228 (#250) ############################################

228 The Prosody of the Seventeenth Century
a
not to be saved by the most liberal allowance of trisyllabic feet,
for libertine accentuation and for other laches of the kind.
On the other hand, the stopped form which had existed
separately in Chaucer himself, which was not unfrequent in
Spenser and Drayton and which, when the octave became popular,
almost obtruded itself as a constant coda, presented a combination,
beyond all question unrivalled in English poetry, of strength,
neatness and regular music. The encomiastic exemplification
of Sir John Beaumont shows us, with perfect clearness, and in
effective terms, what its admirers and practitioners found and
liked in it. The sweetness of the stanza, itself regular enough
but 'long drawn out,' had palled on them; the new overlapped
paragraphs were not regular and were more long drawn out still ;
while a third variety of couplet, which the satirists and, especially,
Donne were attempting? , revolted them, not without reason, by its
roughness. It may, perhaps, be questioned whether those to whom
obvious and unmistakable regularity is the chief charm of verse
have attained to the full understanding of it; but it is certain that,
for a very large number of persons, perhaps even a considerable
majority, regularity does provide this charm. They found it in the
stopped decasyllabic couplet, combined with the further charm of
exact and emphatic rimes, as well as with that (which seems, also,
to have appealed very strongly to popular favour) of limitation
of sense to a manageable modicum of metre.
The history of this battle of the couplets,' as it has been
termed, turns on the names and work of the poets mentioned
and of others. It must not be supposed—and, indeed, will hardly
be supposed by any one conversant with literary history—that
any one of them was a positive and exclusive propagandist of
either kind. Waller, who obtained his traditional title 'reformer
of our numbers' from his practice in the stopped kind, wrote
some of his latest, and some of his best, work in the other.
Cowley, too, affected both; though there is no doubt that his
6
1
The relish of the Muse consists in rhyme :
One verse must meet another like a chime.
Our Saxon shortness hath peculiar grace
In choice of words fit for the ending-place,
Which leave impression in the mind as well
As closing sounds of some delightful bell.
This passage, which is much longer, occurs in his verses addressed to king James
concerning the true form of English poetry.
3 The theory sometimes maintained that this roughness, especially in Donne's own
case, was a deliberate revolt from Spenserian smoothness, if not a deliberate attempt
at a new stress prosody, does not commend itself to the present writer.


## p. 229 (#251) ############################################

Miscellaneous Metres
229
Davideis, with its deliberate introduction of the alexandrine to
vary, weight and extend the stopped form, was of great moment.
On the other hand, as has been observed, Chamberlayne, the
author of Pharonnida, the longest and the best of the enjambed
couplet poems, employs the stopped form in his England's Jubile.
But, little by little, this form triumphed; and its superior
adaptation to the styles of poetry most popular after the restora-
tion-satire, didactics, epistles and the like-must have won the
day for it, even if the faults of its rival! had been less gross.