24 Richard Hooker-John Lyly. Hooker he (Dr. Johnson) admired for his logical precision.Hawkins. You justly conceive Hooker to be a great favourite of mine. Setting aside the inestimable importance of the subject on which he treats, he is so very fine a writer that I am often astonished at the little, I had almost said at the no progress, we have made in composition and in the improvement of the English language since his day.-Hannah More. John Lyly.' 1553-1606. "Euphues" had rather lye shut in a Ladye's casket, than open in a Scholler's studie.-Euphues. John Lyly hath deserved most high commendations, as he hath stept one step further (therein) than any either before or since he begun his witty discourse of his "Euphues." Whose works, surely, in respect of his singular eloquence and brave composition of apt words and sentences, let the learned examine and make trial thereof through all the parts of Rhetorick, in fit phrases, in pithy sentences, in gallant tropes, in flowing speech, 1 In Hazlitt's "Lectures on the Drama" mention is made of Lyly. He is referred to in a passage of such exquisite beauty that it would be injurious to suppress a single line :-"Here on Salisbury Plain, where I write this, even here with a few old authors, I can manage to get through the winter or the summer months without ever knowing what it is to feel ennui. They sit with me at breakfast, they walk out with me before dinner. After a long walk through unfrequented tracts-after starting the hare from the fern, or hearing the wing of the raven rustling over my head, or being greeted with the woodman's stern "good night" as he strikes into his narrow homeward path-I can take mine ease at mine inn beside the blazing hearth, and shake hands with Signor Orlando Frescobaldo as the oldest acquaintance I have. Ben Jonson, learned Chapman, Master Webster, and Master Heywood are there; and seated round, discourse the silent hours away. Shakspeare is there himself, rich in Cibber's manager's coat. Spenser is hardly returned from a ramble through the woods, or is concealed behind a group of nymphs, fawns, and satyrs. Milton lies on the table as on an altar, never taken up or laid down without reverence. Lyly's "Endymion" sleeps with the moon that shines in at the window; and a breath of wind stirring at a distance seems a sigh from the tree under which he grew old. Faustus disputes in one corner of the room with fiendish faces and reasons of divine theology. Bellapont soothes Matteo, Vittoria triumphs over her judges, and old Chapman repeats one of the hymns of Homer in his own fine translation." in plain sense, and surely in my judgment I think he will yield him that verdict-that from one nothing may be taken away, to the other nothing may be added.-William Webbe, 1586. Nash the Ape of Greene, Greene the Ape of Euphues, Euphues the Ape of Ennuie.-G. Hervey. Lyly famous for facility in discourse.-Lodge, 1596. Lyly was a man of great reading, good memory, ready faculty of application, and uncommon eloquence; but he ran into a vast excess of allusion. In sentence and conformity of style he seldom speaks directly to the purpose; but is continually carried away by one odd allusion or simile or other.-W. Oldys. His style is a kind of prodigy for neatness, clearness, and precision. . . A judicious head may receive great improvement by reading his works, which are now scarcely ever mentioned. -Literary Magazine, 1758. These notable productions were full of pedantic and affected phraseology, and of high-strained antitheses of thought and expression.-Gifford. ("Euphues") is a tissue of antitheses and alliteration, and therefore justly entitled to the appellation of affected; but we cannot, with Berkenhout, consider it as a most contemptible piece of nonsense.-N. Drake. Notwithstanding all exaggeration, Lyly was really a man of wit and imagination, though both were deformed by the most unnatural affectation that ever disgraced a printed page.-Sir W. Scott. John Lyly was an ingenious scholar with some fancy; but if poetry be the heightened expression of natural sentiments and impressions, he has little title to the rank of poet. The chief characteristic of his style, besides its smoothness, is the employment of a species of fabulous or unnatural natural philosophy, in which the existence of certain animals, vegetables, and minerals, with peculiar properties, is presumed, in order to afford similes and illustrations.-F. Payne Collier. The style which obtained celebrity is antithetical and sententious to affectation; the perpetual effort with no adequate success, rendering the book equally disagreeable and ridiculous, though it might not be difficult to find passages rather more happy and ingenious than the rest.-Hallam. ("Euphues") as brave, righteous, and pious a book as man need look into.-C. Kingsley. 26 John Lyly-Edmund Spenser. He was always averse to the crabbed studies of logic and philosophy. For so it was that his genie, being naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry (as if Apollo had given to him a wreath of his own bays without snatching or struggling), did in a manner neglect academical studies; yet not so much but that he took the degrees in arts, that of master being completed 1575; at which time as he was esteemed at the university a noted wit, so afterwards was in the Court of Q. Elizabeth, where he was also reputed a rare poet, witty, comical, and facetious. Anthony à Wood Edmund Spenser. 1553-1599. No poet has ever had a more exquisite sense of the beautiful than Spenser.-Prof. Wilson. Spenser may be justly said to excel Ariosto in originality of invention, in force and variety of character, in strength and vividness of conception, in depth of reflection, in fertility of imagination, and above all, in that exclusively poetical cast of feeling which discerns in everything what common minds do not perceive. -Hallam. The nobility of the Spensers has been illustrated and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider the "Faëry Queen" as the most precious jewel of their coronet.-Gibbon. Grave moral SPENSER after these came on, In all our knowledge surely excellent. Michael Drayton. The characteristics of this sweet and amiable allegorical poet are, not only strong and circumstantial imagery, but tender and pathetic feeling, a most melodious flow of versification, and a certain pleasing melancholy in his sentiments, the constant companion of an elegant taste, that casts a delicacy and grace over all his compositions.-Warton. There is a something in Spenser that pleases one as strongly in one's old age as it did in one's youth. I read the "Faëry Queen" when I was about twelve with a vast deal of delight; and I think it gave me as much when I read it over about a year or two ago.-Pope. In all his fantastic prodigality of invention, Spenser is never restrained by the want of adequate language. His endless train of images array themselves instantaneously in varied and harmonious words; if his eye is sensitive to every form of beauty, so is his ear to every sound of music: the very difficulty and complexity of his stanza shows at once his unlimited command of poetic language, and that language falls at once, with rare instances of effort or artificial skill, into flowing and easy verse. His very faults seem to me out of the wanton redundance of power, rather than from the constraint of insufficient or inflexible diction. Whatever English poetic language may have gained in vigour, in perspicuity, or in precision, almost its earliest poet seems to have discovered and exhausted its fertility, its pliancy, its melody.—Quarterly Review. Spenser, though assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, could not succeed in the attempt to make allegory interesting. It was in vain that he lavished the riches of his mind on the House of Pride and the House of Temperance. One unpardonable fault, the fault of tediousness, pervades the whole of the "Fairy Queen." We become sick of cardinal virtues and deadly sins, and long for the society of plain men and women. Of the persons who read the first canto, not one in ten reaches the end of the first book, and not one in a hun. dred perseveres to the end of the poem. Very few and very weary are those who are in at the death of the Blatant BeastMacaulay. Whose deep conceit is such As, passing all conceit, needs no defence.-Shakspeare. Poorly, poor man, he lived; poorly, poor man, he died. A silver trumpet Spenser blows, Phineas Fletcher. And, as its martial notes to silence flee, From a virgin chorus flows A hymn in praise of spotless Chastity. 'Tis still! Wild warblings from th' Eolian lyre Enchantment softly breathe, and tremblingly expire. Keats Spenser had but little knowledge of men as men ; the cardinal virtues were the personages he was acquainted with; in everything he was "high fantastical," and, as a consequence, he exhibits neither humour nor pathos. He was a Platonist and fed his grave spirit on high speculations and moralities. Severe and chivalrous, dreaming of things to come, unsuppled by luxury, unenslaved by passion, somewhat scornful and selfsustained, it needed but a tyrannous king, an electrical political atmosphere, and a deeper interest in theology, to make a Puritan of him, as these things made a Puritan of Milton.-Alexander Smith. The Queen was far from having a just sense of his merit; and Lord Burleigh, who prevented her giving him a hundred pounds, seems to have thought the lowest clerk in his office a more deserving person. He died in want of bread.-Dr. Granger. The many Chaucerisms used (for I will not say affected by him) are thought by the ignorant to be blemishes, known by the learned to be beauties to his book, which notwithstanding had been more saleable if more conformed to our modern language.-Fuller. Had I time I could enlarge on the beautiful turns of words and thoughts which are as requisite in this as in heroic poetry itself. With these beautiful works I confess myself to have been unacquainted till about twenty years ago, in a conversation which I had with that noble wit of Scotland, Sir George Mackenzie, he asked me why I did not imitate in my verse the turns of Mr. Waller and Sir John Denham, of which he repeated many to me. I had often read with pleasure, and with some profit, these two fathers of our English poetry; but had not seriously enough considered their beauties, which give the last perfection to their works. Some sprinklings of this I had also formerly in my plays; but they were casual and not designed. But this hint, thus seasonably given to me, first made me sensible of my own wants, and brought me afterwards to seek for the supply of them in other English authors. I looked over the darling of my youth, the famous Cowley-there I found, instead of them, the points of wit and quirks of epigram; but no elegant turns, either on the word or on the thought. Then I consulted a greater genius (without offence to the manes of that noble author), I mean Milton; but as he endeavours everywhere to express Homer, whose age had not arrived to that fineness, I found in him a true sublimity, lofty |