152 Variation In Shakespeare And Others
152 VARIATION IN SHAKESPEARE AND OTHERS
Sententia cum sit
Unica, non uno veniat contenta paratu,
Sed variet vestes et mutatoria sumat.
Sub verbis aliis praesumpta resume, repone
Pluribus in clausis unum; multiplice forma
Dissimuletur idem; varius sis et tamen idem.
GEOFFROI DE VINSAUF, Poetria Nova, pp.220 et seq.
Read to the Mermaid Club
ONE day (Note: It was between the 2lst and the 30th) in March, 1781, Mrs. Thrale and Boswell presented the Doctor with a problem. Had Shakespeare or Milton drawn the more admirable picture of a man? The passages produced on either side were Hamlet’s description of his father, and Milton’s description of Adam. They run as follows.
See what a grace was seated on this brow,
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven kissing hill;
A combination and a form, indeed,
Where every God did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man. Hamlet, III, iv, 55
His fair large front and eye sublime declar’d
Absolute rule: and hyacinthine locks
Round from his parted forelock manly hung
Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad. Paradise Lost, IV, 300
It may have seemed a little remarkable that the wild genius’ should so abound in classical allusions while the scholar poet was so free from them. But this would surprise no one who was familiar with the works of both; nor is it the most important difference. It is, in the logical sense, an accident that the figures which fill Shakespeare’s description should come from classical mythology. It is their presence and their function, not their source, that matters. The two passages illustrate two radically different methods of poetical description. Milton keeps his eye on the object, and builds up his picture in what seems a natural order. It is distinguished from a prose catalogue largely by the verse, and by the exquisite choice not of the rarest words but of the words which will seem the most nobly obvious when once they have been chosen. Fair large front’ - any one, you would say, could think of that. And yet how well it does its work. Those three monosyllables, heavy yet easily uttered, with the glorious vowel of large, have already smuggled into our minds the sense of massive, leisurely dignity: it is Michelangelo’s Adam in that majestic indolence so dear to native man’; we are prepared for the words absolute rule’ in the next line. Shakespeare’s method is wholly different. Where Milton marches steadily forward, Shakespeare behaves rather like a swallow. He darts at the subject and glances away; and then he is back again before your eyes can follow him. It is as if he kept on having tries at it, and being dissatisfied. He darts image after image at you and still seems to think that he has not done enough. He brings up a whole light artillery of mythology, and gets tired of each piece almost before he has fired it. He wants to see the object from a dozen different angles; if the undignified word is pardonable, he nibbles, like a man trying a tough biscuit now from this side and now from that. You can find the same sort of contrast almost anywhere between these two poets. When Milton wishes to convey to us the greatness of Beelzebub he says:
and in his rising seemed
A pillar of state. Deep on his front engraven
Deliberation sat and public care,
And princely counsel in his face yet shone
Majestic, though in ruin. Sage he stood
With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear
The weight of mightiest monarchies. His look
Drew audience and attention still as night
Or summer’s noontide air. P.L. II, 301
But when Cleopatra wants to tell of Antony’s greatness, she talks like this:
His legs bestrid the ocean: his rear’d arm
Crested the world: his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends;
But when he meant to quail and shake the orb
He was as rattling thunder. For his bounty
There was no winter in’t: an autumn ’twas
That grew the more by reaping. His delights
Were dolphin like: they show’d his back above
The element they lived in, &c. Anthony and Cleopatra V, ii, 82
You see again how simple, how all of one piece, like the clean growth of a tulip, the Milton is: how diversified - more like a chrysanthemum - is the Shakespeare. In Milton you have first the visual impression; then the moral showing through it; the allusion to Atlas, so obvious that any one (we feel) could have guessed it was coming: finally the stillness, compared, so obviously, so un-cleverly, to night or noon, and yet doing to perfection the work it was meant to do. In Shakespeare, as before, you have the ends of the earth all brought together. You begin with the gigantic hyperbole of a man bestriding the ocean, or an arm cresting the world; you go on to the music of the spheres, to thunder, to the seasons, to dolphins. Nor does one image grow out of another. The arm cresting the world is not a development of the legs bestriding the ocean; it is idem in alio, a second attempt at the very same idea an alternative. The dolphin idea is not a continuation of the autumn idea. It is a fresh start. He begins over again in every second line. If you extract the bare logical skeleton, the prose meaning’ of each image, you will find that it is precisely the same in most of them. That is not so with the Milton: the prose abstract would take nearly as many words as the poetical expression. Beelzebub was very big; he looked wise; he looked wise though broken; his shoulders were broad; the people were hushed when they saw him.’ If you do the same to Cleopatra’s speech you get something like this: He was great. He was great. He was great enough to help his friends. He was great enough to hurt his enemies. He was generous. He was generous. He was great.’ In short, Milton gives you a theme developing: Shakespeare pIays variations on a theme that remains the same. In the one, touch after touch is added to the picture until the whole stands completed; in the other you get rather a series of lightning sketches, each of the same subject, and each tossed aside before the sketcher has really finished. We might distinguish these as the method of construction and the method of narration. The first does one thing as well as it can and then proceeds to the next; the second cannot do even one thing except by doing it several times, as if even one thing were inexhaustible, and the poet could only go on having shots at it until mere necessity forced him to give it up.
It would be a mistake to suppose that what we have here stumbled on is simply the difference between epic and dramatic poetry. If I could presume on endless patience I could show you the opposite. I could take Shakespeare where he is himself handling epic matter and show that the very same difference holds between him and Homer as between him and Milton. I would put the Prologue to the third Act of Henry V, where Phoebus is fanning the silken streamers and a city is dancing on the billows beside Homer’s picture of the Greeks advancing in silence with their eyes upon their captains’. (Note: Iliad, IV, 429-31) I would put a dozen speeches from ancient tragedy beside a dozen speeches from Shakepeare. Everywhere almost, though not everywhere to the same degree, we should find the same distinction.
Nor is the difference that between classical and romantic art. Milton’s Beelzebub with his dim vastness and his ruined splendour is ten times more romantic than Cleopatra’s Antony, whose greatness, under all its metaphorical deck hamper, remains greatness of a very mundane and lucrative type. The point can easily be settled by another example. Mr. Yeats says, of the fairies,
How shall I name you, immortal, mild, proud shadows?
I only know that all we know comes from you. (Note: 'I walked among the Seven Woods of Coole', 27)
Prospero tackles them more like this
you demi puppets that
By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whosc pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that delight
To hear the solemn curfew. The Tempest V, i, 36
Here both passages are utterly romantic; but they are as different as any other two that I have cited. Yeats gets his effect by packing as much mystery and longing as he can into a single phrase, without figures: Shakespeare, as always, flits from point to point, and will have five or six attempts to make you see the fairies, by catching them in different places. The method of variation is not a characteristic either of dramatic, or of romantic poetry. Still less is it peculiar to Shakespeare. It is shared by all the Elizabethan dramatists. It was there before Shakespeare.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee
Instead of Troy shall Wertenberg be sacked,
And I will combat with weak Menelaus
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel
And then return to Helen for a kiss. (Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, 1335)
If we reduce the prose content of this to I love you well enough to fight for you, as Paris for Helen,’ we have still not done enough. For the Paris and Helen idea is itself merely illustration, and the whole of the rest of the passage is a ringing of the changes on Paris and Helen, who themselves but ring the changes on the original theme. The method is used equally by a poet who piques himself on being different from the general, like Ben Jonson. Thus in Every Man in his Humour (Note: Q. 1601, III. i) I read
Who will not judge him worthy to be robbed
That sets his doors wide open to a thief
And shews the felon where his treasure lies?
Again what earthy spirit but will attempt
To taste the fruit of beauty’s golden tree
When leaden sleep seals up the dragon’s eyes?
Oh beauty is a project of some power
Chiefly when opportunity attends her.
She will infuse true motion in a stone,
Put glowing fire in an icy soul,
Stuff peasants’ bosoms with proud Caesar’s spleen,
Pour rich device into an empty brain, &c.
The whole passage may very profitably be compared with Milton’s imitation of it in Comus. The six lines beginning Oh beauty is a project’, which contain four distinct metaphorical expressions of precisely the same idea, he throws out altogether. He keeps the dragon idea, and the stores spread out in the sight of a thief, but reverses the order. The dragon comes first and is used for a different purpose. The marvellous line Of dragon watch with unenchanted eye’ (Note: Comus , 394) is the central phrase, and the metaphor as a whole becomes less a rhetorical illustration of the theme than an escape into pure imagination. (Note: See Lewis's 'The Dragon speaks' in Poems , ed. Walter Hooper, London 1964, pp.92-3) The hoard-and-thief idea is separated from it by the words You may as well’, and has the effect of summing up the previous argument. It is not simply one more point that has occurred to the speaker; it is a return to the person addressed, as if he had rounded on him.
It is the same with the later dramatists. If we ever fail to notice it, it is because we are so used to it that it comes to us merged in the general atmosphere of Elizabethan play’. Gentle father, To you I have unclasped my burdened soul, Emptied the storehouse of my thoughts and heart, Made myself poor of secrets: have not left Another word untold which hath not spoke All that I ever durst or think or know.’ (Note: Tis pity She’s a Whore, I, i) Here are four variations on the theme I have confided in you’. There is no movement. Unclasping the burdened soul and emptying the storehouse of one’s thoughts are simply alternative metaphors for the same idea. The one does not grow out of the other, nor improve on it. Or again: You dreamt of kingdoms, did ye? how to bosom The delicacies of a youngling princess, How with this nod to grace that subtle courtyer, How with that frown to make this noble tremble.’ (Note: The broken Heart , IV, iv) Here the variation is not by metaphors, but, as we might say, by particularization. You announce the theme of Kingship first and then go on to ring the changes on particular aspects of Kingship. It is one of the simplest ways of turning an abstract conception into poetry, and is perhaps the commonest of all forms of variation in these dramatists. It does not differ essentially from the metaphorical type. The same choice is before the poet. Some abstraction is to be presented, say, luxury, servility, folly. Are you to do it by finding the single most suggestive phrase that you can and then have done with it? Or are you to try to catch a glimpse of it manifested in as many different modes as you can and fling them all together, varying as many aspects of the theme as possible? The Elizabethans nearly always chose the latter; often with beautiful result.
So shall the spirits of every element
Be always serviceable to us three;
Like lions shall they guard us when we please,
Like Almain rutters with their horseman’s staves
Or Lapland giants trotting by our sides,
Sometimes like women or unwedded maids
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love.
From Venice shall they drag huge argosies
And from America the golden fleece. (Doctor Faustus, 151)
That is Marlowe’s way. The abstraction magical power’ is turned into poetry by the process of variation - by offering you a handful of specimens. One is not enough for him; he tries it from this angle and from that. But there are other ways. Wordsworth has to express a much more abstract conception than that of magical power - the conception, namely, of restraints exercised upon the wiser sort of young men by the wrong sort of old men. He writes simply
And blind authority beating with his staff
The child that might have led him, (The Prelude, III, 608)
and the thing is done. We can all guess how the Elizabethans would have dealt with it. We should have begun, perhaps, with a flourish about authority in the abstract, old and sour as Saturn, but blind as Cupid; and then we should certainly have passed into a series of dissolving views in which we caught glimpses of authority at work - a man being 'progged' in one line, and a conversation with a dean in the next.
It will be understood, of course, that variation occurs to some extent in all poetry whatsoever. What is the Hebrew parallelism but a kind of variation? The synonyms in Anglo-Saxon are the same. But I think it is not likely to be disputed that the Elizabethan dramatists uscd it more extensively than any other family of poets. All poets use metaphors; all poets turn the abstract into the concrete; but if we want to see multiplication of metaphors about the same idea, and if we want to see concreteness given not by a single imaginative phrase but by multiplication of instances, then we naturally turn to Shakespeare and his neighbours. The faculty which enabled a man to practise such variation, which stocked his mind with images and which brought a riot of images tumbing over one another to greet every single idea was for the Elizabethans the essential faculty of the poet. They called it Wit. Middleton in his Changeling (III, iii, 131) writes:
Love has an intellect that runs through all
The scrutinous sciences and like a cunning poet
Catches a quantity of every knowledge
Yet brings all home into one mystery. This may be taken simply as a description of that esemplastic power which is involved in all poetry. But it has a special meaning for the seventeenth century. Never were the scrutinous sciences and the quantities of every knowledge expected to lie quite so ready to the poet’s hand; never were poets so eager to bring them all home (if it were possible) on every occasion.
It is no part of my purpose to compare this kind of writing with others. Whether you prefer the poetry which deals chiefly in construction or that which deals chiefly in variation is largely a matter of temperament. Any sane man will want both. In Shirley you may see this style in the last stages of its decay; all its peculiar vices - for every method has its vices - are then painfully visible. But it is more interesting to consider what this practice of variation could do at its best. What were the kingdoms of poetry which it alone could conquer, and whose conquest made it so dangerously attractive to the weaker poets? To ask this is, of course, equivalent to asking what Shakespeare did with it.
If we lay aside all the bardolatrous nonsense of those who would have us believe that Shakespeare was God or Nature, and ask what, in a few words, was his distinctive contribution to poetry, I really do not know why we should be afraid of answering the question. The largest things ought to be the most easily seen. The law of gravity is perhaps simpler than the Law of Tort. It is the minor poets whose quality is really indefinable, because it is nearly nothing. Thus fortified I venture to submit that the mark of Shakespeare (and it is quite enough for one mortal man) is simply this; to have combined two species of excellence which are not, in a remarkable degree, combined by any other artist, namely the imaginative splendour of the highest type of lyric and the realistic presentation of human life and character. Pindar and Aeschylus and Keats are quite as good as he on one side; and Jane Austen, Meredith, and George Eliot can meet him on the other. But Jane Austen could not write stuff like the choruses in the Agamemnon, and Keats (judging by Cap and Bells) would have made a poor show among the Bennets and the Bingleys - (not such a very poor show, when you remember some of the passages in the letters). Now the possibility of combining two such diverse qualities depends precisely on the use of variation. The problem which Shakespeare solved, perhaps unconsciously, is a very difficult one. If the character speaks as living men speak, how are we to have in his language the revealing splendours of imagination? for real passion is not articulate. We must give his poetic metaphors the air of being thrown off accidentally as he gropes for expression in the very heat of dialogue. He must have a slight stammer in his thought, and his best things must not come at the first attempt. For on those rare occasions when real life finds the inevitable phrase, that is how it arises. The man fumbles and returns again and again to his theme, and hardly knows which of his words has really hit the mark. Listen to Hamlet:
O that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon gainst self slaughter. O God, God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world.
Fie on’t, ah fie Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed: things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. (I, ii, 129)
The flesh resolving itself into a dew, and the unweeded garden are poetical metaphors that, taken alone, might seem to come from the heights of fully wrought lyric, expressing real experience but not as life expresses it. If Hamlet used either of them he would speak only as a poet. We should not believe that a man spoke thus. We shall believe them only if he seems to stumble upon them by accident, if they come, as it were, spat out amid a chaos of other grumbles as he chews over and over again the cud of the same bitter experience. That is how Shakespeare claims for naturalistic poetry - the poetry of the close up - all the rights of that other poetry which sees its figures at a mythical distance. See how he ballasts his imaginative phases with mere exclamations - O God, God!’ and Fie on’t, ah fie.’ A magnificent example of the same thing occurs in Macbeth:
Methought I heard a voice cry Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep’ - the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course
Chief nourisher in life’s feast. (II, ii, 36)
Here the metaphors are perhaps even more highly wrought than Hamlet’s. If Macbeth had said only sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care’, he would have said one of the best things that have been said of sleep. But we should not have believed. It is art, not life, that selects from the mind’s chaos the one predestined and elected phrase That had lain bound long nights and days Until it wore when once set free Immortal pellucidity’. It is the very fact that Macbeth will not leave it at that which carries conviction. Because he is not writing a poem but blurting out the agony of his mind he has no leisure to notice that he has said a good thing. The words come tumbling one after the other, and it is only we the spectators, who gather them up and see that almost every sentence has been a poem in itself. We conclude - and this goes to the root of the matter - that Macbeth was a great poet. It is only in Shakespeare’s plays that we call the characters, as well as the author, poets. No one describes Clytemnestra as a poet. The poetry belongs to Aeschylus. We know that a real Clytemnestra would not talk like that. It is the poet, quite legitimately, who puts into her mouth the language she would not, in real life, have used, and thereby enables us to see her character more luminously than real life would have allowed us to see it. But Shakespeare makes you believe that Othello and Macbeth really spoke as we hear them speak. Without sacrificing the splendour, he has kept the lower and more factual reality as well; it is the very marriage of the mimetic and the creative, and it can hardly be done except by variation.
It would be untrue, however, to say that Shakespeare always used variation to such good purpose. Very often, and specially in his earlier work, he uses it as a poetical ornament - to decorate, and not to render more real, the dramatic situation.
His rash fierce blase of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder;
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself. (Richard II, II, 1, 33)
Here, the not very profound idea hardly requires such a wealth of illustration, and we hardly believe that it would have received it. The passage comes trippingly off the tongue: it is written, I think, for the mere fun of the thing. Such examples are frequent in the earlier plays, and it is in these passages that Shakespeare reminds us most strongly of Marlowe; Marlowe who of all others used variation with the minimum of dramatic purpose, and the maximum of musical and rhetorical effect.
Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight
And burned is Apollo’s laurel bough. (Doctor Faustus, 1478)
In Shakespeare the variations are either ornament, or else, as we have seen, a method of combining poetry and realism. In Shirley they are a recipe for poetry. I do not mean that he uses the figure more constantly than his predecessors; I mean that when he is not using it he has commonly no pretence of poetry. To mark a heightened moment, or to translate an abstract conception into something that looks like poetry, variation is his unfailing resource. When Shirley had jotted down what was to be covered in a given scene, the process of converting it into actual drama consisted either of those purely dramatic articulations in which he does not differ from the prose dramatist or in variation. Where there is poetry there is variation; where there is no variation there is no poetry. Consider the opening scene between Bornwell and his wife in The Lady of Pleasure. The theme can be stated in a few words. A husband rebukes his wife for extravagance and is obstinately answered. A real dramatist would have found in this matter for as many pages as Shirley; but those pages would have been occupied by the development in dialogue of the emotional situation between the two characters. Every speech would have left them related to each other in a slightly new way. On the other hand a pure poet, of the constructive type, would have given us in some few unforgettable words an image clearer than life of the essential quality of luxury and extravagance. We should have seen once and for all what prodigality in all its wasteful beauty means to the imagination. A single line might do it, such as Clytemnestra’s
Estinv qalassa tis de viv katasbesei;
Who shall quench all the purple of the sea? (Agamemnon, 958)
A writer who was both a poet and a dramatist would have given us both together. Every speech would have added a new quality to the relation of the speakers and at the same time would have done what Aeschylus does. Shirley’s method is different from either. On the strictly dramatic side he has nothing to say that could not have been said in six lines. Why are you angry?’ asks Bornwell. Because you stint me,’ retorts the lady. I don’t. On the contrary I allow you to spend far too much,’ says Bornwell. Well, I still think you’re mean,’ says Lady Bornwell. That is the whole scene, as drama. What swells it to its 130 odd lines is pure variation on the theme you spend too much’ put into the mouth of Bornwell. During this the dramatic situation stands still. Have you done, Sir?’ (Note: The Lady of Pleasure , I, i) Lady Bornwell asks at the end of her husband’s first speech; at the end of his third she is still asking, Have you concluded your lecture?’ (Note: Ibid .) The angry husband and the scornful wife remain dramatically immobile and the play ceases to go forward while the waves of variation roll over the audience. In other words, what Shirley has here to say as a dramatist is extremely little; and to convert that little into something that should seem richer he has to call in variation. The variation consists, of course, simply of an endless string of examples of the lady’s extravagance - this Italian master and that Dutchman’, superfluous plate’, vanities of tires’ petticoats and pearls’ (Note: Ibid .). There is no reason why any one image should stand where it does rather than elsewhere. There is no reason why the thing should stop where it does: you might just as well turn the tap off twenty lines sooner or twenty lines later. Nor does the beauty of the separate items recompense us (as it would in Marlowe) for their lack of definite tendency. The best that such writing can do is to give us a vague impression of an angry man who has a great deal to say; but it does this only by making him as tedious as he would be in real life. No method could be easier for the writer; any one who can scan a verse and has a memory well stored can produce such work ad libitum. And as if this were not enough the scene between Bornwell and his wife is followed almost immediately by the similar scene between Celestina and her steward (Note: Ibid ., I, ii). Here, once again, the theme is extravagance opposed to frugality; once again the dramatic development, such as it is, could be shown in a few lines; all the rest is variation. In the next act we have the arrival of Master Frederick and Lady Bornwell’s disgust at his scholarly lack of fashion. Here is a situation very recalcitrant to poetical treatment, but very tempting to a real comic dramatist. It would go admirably into a prose dialogue of short questions and replies. Everything ought to be on the move. We ought to see Lady Bornwell’s gradual discovery of her nephew’s character and opinions: the rift ought to widen at every speech, and at every speech the audience ought to perceive more exactly just what the rift is and how comically exasperating. Instead of this, Shirley lets Lady Bornwell grasp the whole truth, beyond hope of error, and express her horror, in the very first line, Support me, I shall faint’ (Note: Note: The Lady of Pleasure , II, i). The suddenness of this is not without its comic effect; but it is dearly purchased at the price of the following scene, in which, dramatically speaking, there is nothing left to do. The chasm is filled up as usual by the handy rubble of variation. Lady Bornwell’s long speech is merely a string of variations on the theme I wish he were French and fashionable instead of studious and parsonical’, which is itself only an unprogressive amplification of the opening words I shall faint’. And Frederick replies:
Madam, with your pardon, you have practised
Another dialect than was taught me when
I was commended to your care and breeding.
I understand not this. Latin or Greek
Are more familiar to my apprehension.
Logic was not so hard in my first lectures
As your strange language. (Ibid.)
The whole speech is variation; and even the theme which it varies, namely the theme My ways are not your ways’ has already been given in the opening lines of the scene. Frederick’s speech merely restates the opposition between the two characters; it does not show us that opposition alive and growing; it adds new colours to it rhetorically, not dramatically. Shirley’s method is the precise opposite of the true comic method. Shirley gives us endless change of language and leaves us exactly where we were; Moliere, on the other hand, can take the very same words - as he takes the misanthrope’s 'Je ne dis pas cela’ (Le Misanthrope . I, ii) in his scene with the poet - and use them over and over again and yet, at each repetition, give them a new force. The repetition is part of the progression; it is not the same thing for the poet to be relentlessly shut up by the words 'je ne dis pas cela’ the first time as it is the second time. The funniness consists in his bobbing up irrestibly after each suppression, only to be suppressed again. (Note: Cf. of course, Bergson’s analysis of this scene in La Rive ) The identical phrase develops a new vis comica in each new context. If Shirley had been writing George Dandin he would have taken the theme vous l’avez voulu’, variated it into thirty lines of creaking blank verse, put it into the mouth of the husband (probably as the opening speech of the play) and then, for the remaining five acts, would have turned round and round on the same spot like a dog that cannot make up its mind to lie down.
The dangers of variation have; perhaps, as much to do with the decay of the Elizabethan’ theatre as any other internal cause, and its capabilities, as I have suggested, may be one of the principal conditions of Shakespeare’s peculiar greatness. I do not, however, believe that Shakespeare consciously selected the method as a means to that combination of the dramatic and the poetic in which its greatest potential virtue lies. His own early use of it is purely ornamental, and this suggests that he began by accepting it from tradition without much reflection. Its origins, so far as I know, have not been fully examined. I suppose them to lie in Medieval Latin literature of the rhetorical type. A new study of that literature with special reference to its influence on the vernacular poets of what is called the Renaissance’, and a determined inquiry into the channels by which that influence reached them, would be a very useful work.