III: Drab and Transitional Prose

III: Drab and Transitional Prose

With few exceptions the prose which we were considering two chapters ago was ‘applied’ prose, such as never owed too much and often owed too little to conscious artistry. Of such plain writing some awaits us in the present chapter, but we shall also have to deal with picked prose and even with adorned prose—Kunstprosa as the Germans call it. In order to be fair to the latter we must put considerable constraint upon ourselves. Nothing in literature is so ‘desperately mortal’ as a stylish prose. On the other hand, the prose of men who are intent upon their matter and write only to be understood tends, not quite fairly, to gain from the passage of time. Its content, even when mediocre in itself, acquires historical interest; its most commonplace terms of expression grow pleasantly archaic; proverbs and idioms which were part of the common speech seem to the inexperienced reader to be proofs of individual genius; even characteristic faults are at worst refreshingly unlike the faults of our own prose. To all these general causes of misjudgement there must be added in our age a strong bias in favour of strictly functional beauty and a quite unusual distrust of rhetoric. Decoration, externally laid on and inorganic, is now hardly tolerated except in the human face. We must therefore throughout this chapter endeavour, not indeed to exchange our own prejudices for those of the sixteenth century, but to bring ourselves a little nearer to the ideal middle point. We must practice some deliberate indulgence to the adorned prose, and be strictly critical when we read the plain. For not all plain prose is good. Such efforts as ink-horn terms or euphuism may have been misdirected, even barbarous, but those who made them were not wrong in their belief that our prose needed to be heightened and coloured and ‘strongly trussed up’. We forget too easily the faults of the plain Drab. Here, from Harpsfield’s Life of More, is a specimen of the sort of thing the more ambitious stylists were trying to escape from:

The see of Rome being at that time voyde, the Cardinall, being a man very ambitious and desirous to aspire to that dignitie, wherein he had good hope and likelyhood, perceauing himselfe frustrate and eluded of this his aspiring expectation by the meanes of the Emperour Charles commending Cardinall Adrian, sometime his schoolemaster, to the Cardinalls of Rome, for his great learning, vertue and worthines, who therevpon was elected Pope (and comming from Spaine, whereof he had vnder the saide Charles the chiefe gouernement, before his entrie into the Citie of Rome putting off his hose and shoes and, as I haue hearde it credibly reported, bare foote and bare legged passed through the streetes towardes his pallace, with such humblenes as all the people had him in great reuerence) the Cardinall (I saie) waxed so wood therewith that he studied to . . . , &c.

This effect, as of a man speaking with his mouth half full of gravel, had been tolerated long enough.

Sir Thomas Elyot (1490?–1546) though not a self-made man, for he came of a good family, boasts that he is a self-taught one who, from his twelfth year, had no instructor but himself tam in scientiis liberalibus quam in utraque philosophia, though he also tells us that before he was twenty a ‘renoumed’ physician had taken him through Galen. His earliest publication was the Book of the Governor (1531). This was followed in 1532 by Pasquil the Plain and in 1533 by The Knowledge that maketh a Wise Man. The former, possibly derived from an Italian source, is a dialogue in the early Platonic manner between Pasquil, the personification of free speech, and a flatterer called Gnato. Gnato represents Protestantism and is painted as an ignorant hypocrite, one of those who ‘will be in the bowells of diuinitie before they know what belongeth to good humanitie’. He carries in his bosom a copy of the New Testament, but cheek by jowl with it (and ‘Lorde! what discorde is bitweyne these two bokes!’) Chaucer’s Troilus. We have heard from the other side so much about idle monkes and wanton chanouns as the authors of chivalrous romance that the jibe is unexpected. The truth is that in ‘advanced’ circles at that time any party might accuse any other of medieval proclivities; the romances were out of fashion. In 1534 came The Castle of Health, a novelty in so far as it is a medical treatise written by a layman and in the vernacular. Elyot was attacked for writing it both by the doctors who resented the intrusion of an amateur and also by men of his own class who held that such work ‘beseemeth not a knight, he mought haue been much better occupied’. This criticism provoked from him in the second edition a vigorous defence both of the vernacular and of the ‘histories’ or anecdotes with which he had plentifully besprinkled his discourse: ‘they may more surely cure mens affections then diuers physitions do cure maladies’. In 1538 he brought out his Latin-English Dictionary, dedicated to the king whom he obediently salutes as ‘supreme head of the Church under Christ’ and praises for his ‘evangelical faith’. In 1539 came a Banquet of Sapience and in 1540 an Image of Governance. There is evidence that he also began in Latin a book De Rebus Memorabilibus Angliae.

Elyot’s Dictionary is probably the most useful thing he did, but as an English author he is chiefly remembered for the Book of the Governor. By a Governor he means one who rules under a king, a member of the governing classes. His book is thus a sort of blueprint for the education of the aristocracy and falls into place beside those numerous works in which humanists and others at that time endeavoured, not quite ineffectively, to alter their masters. A new type was in fact produced, even if it was not very like what the humanists wanted. Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, Machiavelli’s Prince, Vives’ De Christiana Femina, Erasmus’ Institutio Regis Christiani, and the De Regno et Regis Institutione of Patricius (Francesco Patrizi) all reveal the impulse; so in its own way does the Faerie Queene. Patricius and Erasmus were the two that influenced Elyot most. But he is less philosophical and universal than they, more rooted in the realities of a particular time and place. Erasmus begs rulers to remember how unreasonable it is (quam sit absurdum) for them to be elevated above the people in splendour if they are not proportionately elevated in virtue. Elyot substitutes for quam absurdum ‘what reproche’, changing a sage’s into a gentleman’s censure (II. i). He borrows from Patricius the point that res publica means not ‘common’ but ‘public’ weal. But in Patricius this had been not much more than a philological note; in Elyot (I. i) it is the starting-point for a refutation of egalitarianism and a glowing eulogy of degree which anticipates, as so many authors have done, the speech of Shakespeare’s Ulysses.

Of education in its nursery stage Elyot has nothing of value to say. Like all his kind he issues rigid instructions which would be scattered to the winds by ten minutes’ experience of any real child or any real nurse (he died without issue). In the later chapters of his First Book he is really laying the foundations of the system which, in a narrower but not unrecognizable form, became the ‘classical education’ of our public schools. He has to fight on two fronts. On the one hand he has to rebut the lingering medieval idea (Castiglione says it died hardest in France) ‘that to a great gentleman it is a notable reproche to be well lerned and to be called a great clerke’ (I. xii). It was on this front that the humanists triumphed most completely. The tradition of gentlemanly philistinism slowly but surely decayed and was not reinstated till compulsory games altered the whole character of school life. There was thus a long lucid interval between Squire Western and Bertie Wooster; it is arguable that during that interval England was at her greatest. On the other hand, Elyot has to fight against the current practice of his own day whereby boys having once learned ‘to speake Latine elegantly’ and ‘to make verses without mater or sentence’ (I. xiii) are snatched away to the illiberal but lucrative study of the law, when they ought to be ‘forming their minds’ on the great poets, orators, and philosophers. For these Elyot expresses, and in some sense no doubt sincerely feels, a boundless enthusiasm—‘I feare me to be to longe from noble Homere’. Yet his own praise of Homer does not suggest anything that would now be regarded as discriminating enjoyment. On Virgil he is more convincing (I. x).

Perhaps the most interesting thing in Elyot’s advice is his plea for what we should now call aesthetic education. He laments a decay of the arts in England, by which it has come about that ‘if we wyll haue any thinge well paynted, kerued, or embrawdred’ we must ‘resorte unto straungers’ (I. xiv). A young nobleman who shows any talent for drawing should be given lessons in it; not only for its possible military uses, but for a deeper reason. The man who can draw will ‘alway couaite congruent mater . . . and whan he happeneth to rede or here any fable or historie, forthwith he apprehendeth it more desirously and retaineth it better than any other’ (I. viii).

The Book of the Governor is thus by no means contemptible for its content; at the same time there is nothing in it which suggests a mind of the first order. Elyot is a well informed man, not a scholar; a sensible man (for the most part), not a deep thinker. As a stylist he has perhaps higher claims. His verse, which appears frequently in short translated extracts from the ancients, is Late Medieval and worthless. Within his prose we must make distinctions. The florid Proheme, to Henry VIII, is not characteristic. Nor is II. xii, where his Burtonian love of ‘histories’ overflows all bounds and produces in the story of Titus and Gisippus (from Boccaccio) what is really a full dress novella. Here he is a little aureate (‘Am I of that vertue that I may resiste agayne celestiall influence preordinate by prouidence diuine?’). But that is not the true Elyot. The love of long words is indeed a constant trait. In this respect Elyot is at the opposite pole from the purist Cheke. He is a convinced and conscious neologist, and is prepared to defend his practice ‘for the necessary augmentation of our language’ (I. xxii). No one will now seriously deny the necessity; and fortune so sways the destiny of words that it would be harsh to blame Elyot if his mansuetude, pristinate, and levigate have not succeeded. It is not these, whether we praise or blame them, that should determine his place as a writer. The important thing is that Elyot is aware of prose as an art. His sentences do not simply happen, they are built. He keeps a firm hold of his construction, he is nearly always lucid, and his rhythm is generally sound. In a word, his prose is, for good as well as for ill, more literary than More’s. Hence some loss of race and intimacy (humour he probably had little to express) and hence also a freedom from confusion and monotony. The difference is still a very fine one, not easily to be discovered by comparing a sentence or two of his with a sentence or two of More’s. After a day’s reading it becomes noticeable. If it were possible for authors to be always either as lively as More or as lyrical as Tyndale at their best, the appearance of such prose as Elyot’s would be a disaster. As things are, the gain almost equals the loss. I am not suggesting that Elyot, or a thousand such as Elyot, matter to the mind and heart of man as More matters; but the ear of man must sometimes prefer him.

The same impulse towards a more formal prose appears in the historian Edward Hall (1499?–1547) and has in him been compendiously damned by Ascham as ‘indenture Englishe’ and ‘strange and inkhorne tearmes’. ‘Indenture English’ refers no doubt to coupled synonyms such as Hall’s ‘gredy and auaricious’, ‘an innocent with a nocent, a man vngilty with a gilty’, ‘poore and needy’; ‘inkhorne tearmes’, to such real or supposed neologisms as abbreviated, parasite, culpe, or sepulted—not all of which the language would now willingly spare. Hall is deliberately trying to write better than he talked. He is fond of the allegorical figure; ‘that venemous worme, that dreadfull dragon, called disdain of superioritie’ or ‘the slowe worme and deadely Dormouse called Idlenes’. He is much indebted for style, as for matter, to Polydore Vergil. In his character sketches Latin models make their presence very noticeable, as when he writes of Henry V, ‘No Emperoure in magnanimitie euer him excelled. No potentate was more piteous nor lorde more bounteous. No prince had lesse of his subiectes and neuer king conquered more.’ He seldom lets slip any occasion for a (fictitious) set speech: Thucydides, who alone could really bend that bow, has much to answer for. He is fond of what medieval rhetoricians called Occupatio; ‘What should I reherse?’—‘What should I write?’ Sometimes we seem in Hall to hear the premonitory drops of what later became the shower of euphuism:

What so euer man intendeth, God sodainly reuerseth, what princes wil, God wil not, what we thinke stable God sodainly maketh mutable. . . .

But here, as always whether in prose or verse, a narrative style is not to be judged by snippets. You must read for at least half a day and read with your mind on the story. If Hall is given a fair chance he will be found, at worst, very tolerable. Ascham exaggerates: it is indeed significant that the purists could never make their case without exaggeration or without inventing men of straw to attack, such as Wilson’s ‘Lincolneshire man’ in his Art of Rhetoric. I do not think that many who, without reading Hall, read Holinshed where he follows him almost verbatim, make any complaint of the style; change the dog’s name and no one will hang him. Hall’s narrative—proems and conclusions are no fair test—is nearly always readable, and sometimes splendid. Even where the art is most apparent, the effect may be good, as in this of Shrewsbury:

The prince Henry that daie holpe muche his father, for although he wer sore wounded in the face with an arow, yet he neuer ceased ether to fight where the battail was moste strongest, or to courage his men where their hertes were moste danted.

This has, in Johnson’s words, ‘the formality of a settled style in which the first half of the sentence betrays the other’. But the demands of the rhythm are properly met by the matter. We should have had no Johnson, no Gibbon, and perhaps no Thomas Browne if the road on which Hall was setting out had been effectively closed by the doubtful canon of ‘writing as you talk’. To some tastes, including my own, this new kind of history will always seem a poor thing compared with the best of the old—with Snorri or Froissart. But for most Englishmen in Hall’s time there was no such alternative. That clear, effortless narrative was not within their reach. If Hall had not been artificial he would probably have sunk to the level of his editor and (in 1562) successor, Richard Grafton:

He banished out of his Court nicenesse and wantonnesse, and committed Reynulph Bishop of Duresme, a man hated of all men for oppression, bribery and diuerse other notable crymes, and a chiefe Counsaylour and perswader also of the King his brother in all his lewde and vngodly attemptes to the tower of London, the which before you haue heard was so great with his brother William (Chronicle at Large, Henry, I).

The sentence may not be by Grafton (very little of his Chronicle at Large is) but it will illustrate the point equally well whoever wrote it.

So much for Hall’s place in the history of style; but his book, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York (1548) has other claims on our attention. Except for the reign of Henry VIII (where the historians value him) Hall does not claim to be an original authority; indeed he expressly tells us that his work was ‘compiled and gathered (not made) out of diuerse writers’. Still less can he be praised for impartiality. In religion he is frankly on the Protestant side, in politics he is the spokesman of the official Tudor point of view. Yet he has a twofold literary importance. His work, after More’s Richard III, is the first English attempt at history in the grand manner. In a previous chapter we saw historiography budding off from the Chronicles of London. Hall, inspired by More and Polydore Vergil, whose Historia Anglica (1534) did for us (and much better) what Boece had done for the art of history in Scotland, severs that old connexion. The very title of his book is significant. He is not an annalist, bound to record whatever happened, but a man selecting a subject and writing with a standard of relevance in view; he can omit things which are ‘no parte of my processe’—though it must be confessed that he does not always do so. And secondly, he is the great transmitter of the English legend as it was fashioned by Vergil and as it lived in the minds of the Elizabethans. His good Duke Humphrey, his Margaret, his Suffolk, together with More’s Richard, are substantially those of Shakespeare. His love of pageantry offends some moderns, but the taste for it must be acquired if we are to understand the sixteenth century. The splendours which he describes did not seem to him mere externals. A fine armour is almost part of the personality of the knight who wears it; and there was doubtless to him an almost spiritual significance in the appearance of Richard III’s guard at his coronation, ‘euil appareled and worse harneissed in rusty harneys neither defensable nor skoured to the sale, to the great disdain of all the lookers on’. On the whole it is difficult (though not impossible) to understand why Hall receives from most critics so much less attention than either Elyot or Ascham.

As regards Elyot and Ascham in common, the explanation presumably lies in that exaggerated reverence for humanism which has long infected our critical tradition. But as regards Roger Ascham (1515–68), considered by himself, there is another and better reason. There is nothing about Hall that excites love: we praise the writer, but feel that the man may have been little better than a government tool. Ascham, on the other hand, is everyone’s friend. He is irresistible. In his own day nearly everyone seems to have liked him. Despite his avowed Protestantism, Mary made him her Latin Secretary and he found it possible all through her reign to abide by his religion with (let us hope) no disgraceful degree of prudence. His very weaknesses—‘too much given to dicing and cock-fighting’, says Camden—were of a genial sort, and it is plain that he was a good schoolmaster, a good husband, and a good friend. His delightful, and delighted, temperament has flowed into his writing.

His Toxophilus (1545) is one of the most genial and winning books that had yet appeared in English. The modern reader who feels the subject of archery to be a little remote has only to realize that it was to Ascham what cricket has been to many of his successors and all will be well. The tone is unmistakable. Archery is England’s safety and glory (for it is a vile French lie that the Scotch shoot better than we); these new fangled guns are unreliable and at the mercy of the weather; nothing keeps a man so fit as shooting at the butts; archery gets boys out into the open air, and away from those nasty cards. Archery, that is, with your true English long-bow. Cross-bows are a poor affair. You find no mention of them ‘in any good Authour’. Shooting is far better sport than bowls or music—especially the sort of music that is increasingly popular nowadays with its ‘nice, fine, minikin fingering’, only fit for use ‘in the courte among ladies’: if they used pricksong and plainsong, it would be another matter. Thus the book is, if you will, a farrago of prejudices: but then that is its charm. Ascham is everywhere writing of what he knows and loves, and is full of reality. The attack on gaming (which he was in one sense only too well qualified to deliver) introduces some lively painting of low life. The reminiscences of Erasmus, Cheke, and Elyot are pleasant: still more so, Ascham’s memory of his own childhood when kind Sir Humfrey Wingfield would come down from London with a bow and shafts and set all the boys to shooting. What is best of all is the passage about air and snow: I hardly know where such loving observation can be found again till we come to the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. The only real weakness of Toxophilus is that the dialogue (for it is cast in that form) does not come to much life, though in the digression on Excellence and Possibility the Platonic manner is closely imitated.

The Schoolmaster, posthumously published in 1570, occupied the last years of Ascham’s life. Its starting-point was a conversation in 1563 about some Eton boys who had run away ‘for feare of beating’. This provoked from Ascham, to his lasting glory, a protest (I think the first in English) against cruelty in teaching. As a treatise on education his book is in a very different class from the works of Erasmus and Elyot. There are no grandiose projects. Instead, we have the technical advice of a practising teacher who knows what pupils, whether ‘hard’ or ‘quick’ wits, can really do. On this side Ascham’s precepts are to be judged only by those who have had some experience of his trade; the literary historian can have no opinion on the mischief of ‘making Latines’ or the virtues of the ‘two paper bokes’. The author’s love both of boys and of learning is, however, plain for all to see. What is less attractive is his general conception of literature. Ascham is a rigid humanist, a professed follower of his contemporary Sturmius, a Ciceronian, and a wholehearted adherent to the doctrine of Imitation. This does not mean Aristotle’s imitation of Nature, but that imitation of authors by authors which the dependence of Roman literature upon Greek had elevated into a principle. By Ascham’s time it has become imitation of imitation. We are to learn how to copy Tully by studying his methods of copying Demosthenes and then copying them. Ascham’s belief in the nutritive value of this feast of husks is astonishing; he quotes with approval Cheke’s optimistic statement, ‘he that will dwell in these few bookes onelie, first in Gods holie Bible, and than ioyne with it Tullie in Latin, Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Isocrates and Demosthenes in Greke, must nedes proue an excellent man’. Contrariwise, he is confident that ‘who so euer be founde fonde in iudgement of matter, be commonlie found as rude in vttering their mynde’. Such are ‘Stoickes, Anabaptistes, and Friers, with Epicures, Libertines and Monkes’. Style (and that very narrowly conceived) is coming to be the whole of learning. ‘Musicke, Arithmetick, and Geometrie’, if not kept firmly in their place, ‘sharpen mens wittes ouer moch’ and ‘change mens maners ouer sore.’ And in Toxophilus Ascham had already told us that eloquence is ‘a thinge moste necessary of all other for a captayne’.

It is no kindness to Ascham to give him a place among English critics. His attack on medieval romance is a humanist commonplace. His reference in Toxophilus to Chaucer as ‘our Englyshe Homer’ will do well enough as a conventional bow to a venerable figure: if taken more seriously it would indicate a most imperceptive reading of both poets. His general theory of poetry, in the same book, is the common and disastrous one that poets ‘vnder the couering of a fable do hyde and wrappe in goodlie preceptes of philosophie’. His attack on rhyme was important only in so far as it was mischievous. He makes no attempt to analyze; the only approach to an argument is, characteristically, the statement that rhyme is derived from the ‘Gothes and Hunnes’. The best we can say for Ascham as a critic is that if he has no virtues, at least his faults are not original but those of his school. And all the time, even in his driest or most perverse pages, we feel the presence of a humanity which his humanism could never quite defeat.

Ascham’s English style is praised in Gabriel Harvey’s Ciceronianus (1577) as eleganti, perpolitoque sermone praeditus, as limatus and nitidus. A modern reader who worked back to Ascham from Sidney or Hooker would not perhaps immediately notice this polish, this labour of the file. Ascham would strike him as a plain writer. In reality he is as conscious as Elyot or Hall and belongs with them to the refining party; but he is on the other wing of that party, a purist like his friend Cheke. He rebukes the neologists for ‘using straunge words as latin, french and Italian’ till they ‘make all thinges darke and harde’. He would rather write ‘faule of the leafe’ than ‘Autumn’. But to avoid ink-horn terms meant, not to write as you spoke, but to depend on other devices. Notice the (perhaps excessive) balance of the following:

Howe honest a pastyme for the mynde, how holsome an exercise for the bodye, not vile for great men to vse, not costlye for poore men to susteyne, not lurking in holes and corners for ill men at their pleasure to misuse it, but abiding in the open sight and face of the worlde for good men, if it fault, by theyr wisdome to correct it.

We also find alliteration; ‘but seeing with wishing we can not haue one nowe worthie’ or ‘muche musike marreth mennes maners, sayth Galen’. Sometimes we find alliteration and antithesis together—‘being not so paynfull for the labour as pleasaunt for the pastyme’. These tricks, if used more continuously and seasoned with enough similes would amount to what we have been taught to call euphuism. Euphuism is, in fact, an extreme development of the purist type of refinement. In Ascham that extreme is still a fair distance away. The symmetry does not usually force itself upon our attention and is often perceived only by its happy result—the ease with which the sentences take their place in our mind. Ascham at his best is too full of things to be the slave of his own stylishness. He had eyes as well as ears—eyes not only for the snow but for the unlucky archer ‘crying after the shafte’, for the optical illusions produced by broken ground, for a cook in the kitchen chopping herbs ‘with such a measure . . . as would delyte a manne both to se hym and heare hym’. Ascham the humanist is narrow enough; once get him out of the schoolroom and he pleases us all because he is pleased with everything.

Ascham’s fellow collegian John Cheke (1514–57), though his senior and indeed his tutor, appeared later as a writer in the vernacular. In that capacity he is not of much importance. Cheke was primarily a don, the first Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, the tutor of William Cecil, of Edward VI, and occasionally of Elizabeth, the man who helped to make St. John’s a centre of early Protestantism and early humanism. He was also, less happily, an early specimen of the fashionable and political don. His reforming zeal was by no means confined to religion. He wanted men to approach not only theology but all subjects ‘without being at all prepossessed’, says Strype, by the ‘commonly received notions’. He was a believer in the ‘clean sweep’, a sharp, scrutinizing man of the type common at Cambridge in the sixteenth century and happily not extinct in the twentieth. One of his innovations, the ‘new’ pronunciation of Greek, was almost certainly in the right direction. His life was a medieval ‘tragedie’ of rise and fall. At one time he was influential with Anne Boleyn, later with Edward VI, enriched with monastic lands, knighted, made Provost of King’s. Then came Mary’s reign, exile, poverty, a treacherous safe conduct to Brussels, capture, the Tower, the threat of Smithfield. His courage failed, he recanted, and died a miserable man.

It was not out of character that such a man should be a keen astrologer. He was also, to speak freely, something of a crank. He had a bee in his bonnet about ‘pure and unmixed’ English and another about spelling reform. His translation of St. Matthew is a monument of both. From this curious work it appears that Cheke, like so many purists, had not given much serious thought to the language he wished to purify. If ‘lunatic’ is to become moond, and ‘apostle’ frosent, and a ‘proselyte’ a freshman, and to be ‘crucified’, to be crossed, it is not easy to see why he retains such words as conforted, persequuted, and vnsaverie. But perhaps his motives were not purely philological. Romance words, or at least such romance words as the accidents of habit and prejudice made noticeable to him, smelled of aureation and therefore of the Middle Ages—away with them! There might also be a wish to recede as far as possible from Gardiner and his 1542 list of words that must not be translated; for Gardiner was not only a Papist but a Chancellor of Cambridge who had used his authority to suppress the new pronunciation of Greek. But the matter is of little consequence; Cheke as a translator of scripture is only a curiosity. His Hurt of Sedition (1549) is a government pamphlet addressed to the rebels; the ‘other learned and useful tracts’ with which tradition credited him are not now easily to be identified. The Hurt of Sedition, though better than anything of the same sort would be likely to be in our own days, is not very memorable. It bears no trace of his purist fancies. There is a plentiful, yet not obtrusive, employment of antithesis and he likes to accumulate clauses of the same type—‘disobedience is thought stoutnesse and sullennesse is counted manhood and stomaking is courage and prating is iudged wisedome and the elvishest is most meete to rule’. In general the style is much less visibly artful than that of Elyot, Hall, or Ascham, it is nearer to More’s. It even has something of the old pungency: ‘ye haue encamped your selfe in fielde and there lyke a byle in a body, nay lyke a sinke in a towne, haue gathered togither all the nastie vagabondes and ydle loyterers.’ But whatever Cheke does well others do better, and the fads which may have impressed the combination-room make a thin sound across the centuries; vocem exiguam, inceptus clamor frustratur hiantem.

The Dialogue of Thomas Starkey (1499?–1538), composed about 1534, uses a style less artificial than Elyot’s or Hall’s but generally avoids the confusion of the old go-as-you-please manner. He does not seem to attempt eloquence but becomes eloquent unawares in the passage beginning ‘Let vs, as hyt were, out of a hyar place’ (I. i). As a writer of dialogue he does not rank very high. His speakers are feigned to be Thomas Lupset and Cardinal Pole (men well worth a digression each if the scale of my book allowed it) but they might almost as well be nameless and there is little pretence of dramatic life. The content of the work is extremely interesting. After a ‘vnyuersal and scolastycal consideratyon’ on the active and contemplative lives and on Natural and Civil Law (this part is really very well done) he unfolds his plans for England. They include an elective, and strictly limited monarchy, the imposition of Roman Law, the suppression of ‘curyouse deuysarys of new songs’, the closing of public houses, and a tax on bachelors. In religion, though Starkey has no sympathy with Protestant theology, he approves many Protestant practices—a married clergy, services in English, and resistance to papal dispensations. A most interesting trait is his passionate love of urban life. The old Stoic idea that man lived best in ‘the wyld forest’ is produced only to be contradicted. Gentlemen like living in the country but ‘thys ys a great rudenes and a barbarous custome’; they must be compelled ‘to retyre to cytes and townys and to byld them housys in the same’. Gentlemen have so often been urged to do exactly the opposite that we read this passage with bewilderment: the explanation is perhaps to be found in Starkey’s humanism. Town may have seemed to him more ‘classical’ than country, more redolent of Terence; he has much to say of the ‘ornamentys’ of cities and possibly dreamed of a little Athens in every county. Starkey is no Solomon and thinks that the disorders usually attendant upon elective monarchy could be avoided by confining the election to ‘the auncyent famylys’. In one passage (I. ii) he anticipates Milton’s refusal to praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue and maintains that the man who lives well ‘in daungerous prosperyte’ deserves more praise than he who ‘for feare of the same daungerys runnyth in to a relygyouse house’.

All the writers I have yet mentioned are in some degree artists; a much homelier and less ambitious prose is offered by the Protestant Brinkelow, and the Papists Roper and Harpsfield.

Of Henry Brinkelow we know almost nothing except that he died in 1546, that he had been ‘somtyme a gray fryre’, and that he was in Bale’s opinion a pious man fide magis quam eruditione clarus. Of the three books which Bale attributes to him two can be certainly identified with the Lamentation of a Christian against the City of London (1542?) and the Complaint of Roderick Mors (1548?). The Lamentation is mainly moral and theological, the Complaint economic and political as well. It records the disappointment of an ardent Lutheran who had approved (and still approves) the dissolution of the monasteries on doctrinal grounds, but is shocked by its actual results. The new owners are even worse landlords and worse patrons than the abbeys; and ‘this is a fayre amendment . . . it is amendid euen as the deuel amended his damys legg’. The great merit of this piece is that Brinkelow goes beyond the common medieval appeal for perfect moral virtue in all ‘estates’ and shows us economic necessities. Rising rents must produce a rise in prices, and a rise in the price of wool must lose us our foreign markets, ‘make what actes ye can deuyse to the contrary’. All this is done in a prose which has not perhaps been sufficiently praised. It goes about as far towards excellence as a merely natural style can go when the author is neither a humorist nor a poet, and is far less confused and monotonous than such styles usually are. It has even its own untaught eloquence:

Death, death, euyn for tryfyls, so that thei folow the High Prystys in crucifyeing Christ, saying nos habemus legem and secundum legem nostram debet mori, we haue a lawe and by our lawe he ought to dye. This mori, mori, dye, dye, went neuer owt of the pristes mowthes syns that tyme, and now thei haue poysonyd the temporal rulars with the same.

Brinkelow’s style, intelligence, and honest passion deserve more attention than they usually receive.

Harpsfield and Roper both availed themselves of the brief freedom which their religion enjoyed under Mary to produce Lives of Sir Thomas More. Both works are of great interest but not of equal literary merit. Nicholas Harpsfield (1519–75) was the Marian Archdeacon of Canterbury and is of some importance as a neo-Latin controversialist and historian. His Life and Death of Sir Thomas More was composed while the folio of More’s Works was going through the press; presumably in 1556. It is far more ambitious than Roper’s, and its historical merits have been praised by students on both sides, but it is hardly a satisfactory book. All its best passages are taken, often word for word, from Roper whose manuscript, perhaps in an unfinished state, had been placed at Harpsfield’s disposal. His own writing can ill bear the comparison. Most authors in this period can be classified either as ‘plain’ or as ‘literary’, and there is something to dislike in each class; Harpsfield unhappily shares the faults of both. His intermittent decorations do not please. We weary of triplets like ‘impaired, blemished, or defaced’, ‘quicken, refresh, and exhilerate’. All good men love Margaret Roper; but no man will love her more for hearing her compared, all in one breath, to Sappho, Aspasia, Damo, Cornelia, Fabiola, Marcella, Paula, and Eustochium. Yet at other times Harpsfield is only too natural; he will set off without forethought on too long a sentence and sink over boots and breech in a quagmire of clauses. Neither fault, however, is incessant, and specimens of good (or goodish) plain prose can be found. Yet when all is said, his book lives by the beauty and greatness of its matter and not by Harpsfield’s skill.

William Roper (1496–1578) in small compass produced a masterpiece. In narrative his prose may sometimes be a little heavy, but his dialogue is excellent. He shares with Boswell the power of giving to reported conversation that appearance of reality which we demand of conversations in fiction. The gift is extremely rare; neither Spence nor Eckermann had it in a comparable degree, and in Plato we suspect a larger element of fiction. And it has every right to be regarded as a literary gift. Roper also shares Boswell’s humility; he will cast himself for the fool’s part if the anecdote demands it. All the best stories about More come from him. One merit which he and Harpsfield have in common deserves to be pondered: both write almost pure panegyric without awaking either disgust or incredulity. One would have to mount into very high regions indeed to find a parallel.

A third Marian biography, also on the Roman side, is Cavendish’s Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey. George Cavendish (c. 1500–61?) had been one of the cardinal’s gentlemen ushers; internal evidence shows that he wrote between July 1554 and February 1557. His Life is a work of singular beauty, not so much for its style (which is perhaps a little better than Harpsfield’s) as for its unity of effect. In any later period such a life would tend to have the purpose either of blackening or defending its hero. That is not Cavendish’s aim. He extenuates little or nothing and sets down naught in malice. He notes his master’s faults—‘pride and arrogance’ and ‘more respect to the worldly honour of his person than he had to his spiritual profession’. Yet it is not his chief concern to show, in the Greek fashion, how hybris provokes nemesis. That comes in; but in the main the life of Wolsey is to Cavendish one of the ‘falls of princes’, an illustration of Fortune’s turning wheel. The moral is, ‘let all men to whom Fortune extendeth her grace not trust too much to her fickle favour’, and his book conforms perfectly to the medieval pattern of ‘tragedie’. That pattern justifies (what Cavendish would probably have loved to write even without justification) the piled-up descriptions of magnificence with which the story is filled; Wolsey’s gentlemen ‘in coats of crimson veluet of the most purest colour that might be inuented’, himself in ‘fine scarlet or else crimson satin, taffety, damask or caffa’, his table served with confections in which birds, beasts, dancers or battles were ‘most liuely made and counterfeited’, his train a quarter of a mile long, his very mule ‘trapped with a foot-cloth and traps of crimson veluet upon veluet purled with gold’. It goes on perhaps too long. It betrays something of the nostalgic loquacity we may meet today in an old domestic who remembers the age of great houses. But on the whole it is proper to Cavendish’s theme. All builds up to the hour when Fortune with Venus (in the person of Anne Boleyn) as her instrument ‘thought she would deuyse a mean to abate his high port’. The end (‘If I had serued God as diligentlie as I haue done the King’, &c.) is familiar. The behaviour attributed to Wolsey in disgrace is strikingly unlike that of an Elizabethan hero or an Elizabethan villain. He is more like a whipped dog; such is the medieval acquiescence in Fortune’s decree. This is perhaps the last work written in English which belongs completely to the Middle Ages. The prefatory verses are, appropriately, in the style and metre of Hawes.

The Life of Fisher found in MS. Harleian 6382, though clearly composed after Mary’s death, belongs to the school of Harpsfield and Roper. Since the author feels it necessary to say that London is ‘the head cittie of England’ he presumably had foreign readers in view and intended his book to be turned into Latin. Save for a few clusters of rhetorical questions, his prose is very artless and there are some long, disheveled sentences. If in a few passages—on Queen Katharine before the Legate’s court and on the sufferings and death of Fisher—his work is as moving as anything in the whole range of English historical writing, this is chiefly due to his matter. Chiefly, not wholly: for while he has none of the literary talent which could set off a dull theme, he is at least free from all those literary vices which really offend a reader. He has the old infirmities, but no vulgarity, no fashionable grimaces.

Protestantism under Mary found an interesting expression in the Short Treatise of Politic Power by John Poynet or Ponet, the exiled Bishop of Winchester, posthumously and anonymously printed in 1556. It is a well-pressed attack on the (momentarily papistical) Tudor Monarchy in the light of the medieval conception of Natural Law. Its style displays very varied powers in short space. In the flyting of Bonner we have the slapstick manner dear to More and later to be revived by Nashe: (‘Some of you chaplaines get my lorde a cup of sacke to comforte his spirites. My lorde and I agree almost like belles, we iare somwhat but not muche, his lordship meaneth that men ought to be alwaies but not at all tymes honest, but I saie they must honest be alwaies and at all tymes.’) In sharp contrast to this we find almost Johnsonian weight and precision in the statement that those who admit absolute sovereignty ‘purchase to themselves a perpetuall vncertaintie both of life and goodes’. Elsewhere, on Hooker’s own theme, he can at times be as lofty as Hooker himself;

The Ethnikes (albeit they had not the right and perfite true knowlage of God) were endued with the knowlage of the lawe of nature. For it is no priuate lawe to a fewe or certain people but common to all; not written in bokes but graffed in the heartes of men; not made by man but ordained of God; which we haue not learned, receaued, or redde but haue taken, sucked, and drawne it out of nature; wherevnto we are not taught but made.

If he had fully known how good the last clause is, he might have spared some of the others; but clearly we are dealing with a strong writer.

In contrast to Poynet we may place Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77), the humanist, the learned civilian, and the man of affairs. His De Republica Anglorum, partly written in the sixties, was not published till 1583. Smith’s political thought is singularly free from moral and theological elements and he is not interested in Natural Law. The ‘lawe already put’ in any commonwealth seems to be almost the final standard by which Conduct is to be judged; hence ‘if it be ciuilly vnderstood’ Thrasymachus’ definition of justice as the interest of the stronger ‘is not so far oute of the waie as Plato would make it’ (I. ii). Ultimate questions, as whether rebellion is ever justifiable (I. v) or whether every monarch have παμβασιλείαν ‘if he would vse the same’ (I. viii) are mentioned only to be waived. His beliefs about the origin of the State are largely derived from Aristotle. His main purpose, however, is not to speculate but to describe, and he thus becomes an author of value to constitutional historians. For the literary student he is of only moderate interest. His sentences, wholly unadorned, are usually long and have a dry lucidity.

A far feebler, and anonymous, work of the same period is The Institution of a Gentleman (1555). It is of some interest to social historians and has been mentioned from that point of view in a previous chapter. The distinction between ‘gentle gentle’, ‘gentle ungentle’, and ‘ungentle gentle’ is well expounded and the style has no serious fault. But the author has no light to throw on the theory of aristocracy, defining his ‘gentleman’ in purely ethical terms and thus failing to define the very thing he is concerned with: for the word gentleman never meant simply ‘a good man’. At the same time he is not ethical enough and among the virtues which he attributes to gentlemen we find not one word about their duties as landlords.

With Thomas Wilson (1525?–81) we return to humanist circles. Wilson is the friend of Cheke and Ascham and the translator of Three Orations (1570) from Demosthenes, besides being a civilian and a public servant who had both suffered torture in Rome from the Inquisition and inflicted it on Norfolk’s followers in the Tower. He has left us in English three treatises. The Rule of Reason (1551) is an introduction to logic commissioned by the printer Whitchurch. Its dedicatory epistle to Edward VI reflects the optimism of a man who found his own age congenial for its ‘forwardnesse’ whereby ‘the very multitude are prompte and ripe in al sciences’. The book is of course a mere work of popularization and aims at no originality. A modern reader, heir to many improvements in the art of making textbooks, will find it dark and crabbed. The Art of Rhetoric, first issued in 1553, but revised and enlarged in 1560 and then frequently reprinted, has won more celebrity: not so much, perhaps, by its intrinsic merits as because it happens to tell us things that we are now glad to know. Wilson’s conception of fine writing shows the drift towards euphuism, and that in two respects. He recommends the use of similes from supposed natural history; ‘brute beastes minister greate occasion of right good matter’—‘in young Storkes we may take an example of loue towards their damme’—‘in young Vipers there is a contrary example’. He also praises like ending (as ‘in deede miserably, in fashion cruelly, in cause deuilishly’) and like falling (‘by greate travaile is gotten much auaile’) and notes the logical and phonetic conditions under which these two kinds of ‘exornation’ are ‘most delitefull’. All are fulfilled in such a sentence as ‘a meeter man to driue the cart then to serue the court’. It will be noticed that Wilson is silent about Spanish or Italian models for this way of writing: its extreme representative is for him St. Augustine. Elsewhere, when he tells us that ‘the fine courtier in his day ‘will talke nothing but Chaucer’ he introduces us to another side of the Drab Age—the ‘neo-Medievalism’ which we found in some Tottelians. On vocabulary he is a moderate purist, attacking what he calls ‘ynkehorne termes’ but admitting such Latin and Greek loan-words as usage will sanction. These obiter dicta, together with a tolerable vein of anecdote, have saved his book from oblivion. To judge its merits as a handbook is not easy for us who do not know the art Wilson is teaching; I suspect, rather than believe, that it is not very good. His definitions are not always easy to understand, and if we are seeking ‘an especiall and soueraine preseruatiue against the infection of cankard obliuion’ it helps little to be told to ‘cherish the memorie from time to time’. But Wilson’s literary fame ought not to rest upon his Rhetoric; the Discourse upon Usury, finished in 1569 but not published till 1572, handles with more intelligence and more imagination a theme of more permanent interest. It is a dialogue in which a Merchant (Gromel Gayner) a Common Lawyer, a Civilian, and a Preacher (Ockerfoe) are the speakers. Its great merit is that, unlike most literary dialogues, it gives fair play to both sides. The defence of usury is divided between the Merchant and the Common Lawyer. This enables Wilson to put into the character of the Merchant (who combines the avarice of Scrooge with the cheery brutality of Squeers) all his real hatred of usury while allowing the Common Lawyer to advance whatever can be reasonably, and therefore formidably, said in its defence. Full dramatic life was not of course aimed at, but his speakers are not mere names, or not till the last page when no one believes for a moment in Gromel Gayner’s conversion. In his earlier speeches he was a man; ‘I see here is some sporte towardes; there will be snappyng and snarring’—‘I will heare further before I geeue vp because it may bee there is some shifte to saue a mans conscience with all’—‘I will neither saye buffe nor baffe, for as you may perceyue I haue often greeted your good talk with a nodde’. Wilson’s own views are expressed, often with great lucidity and energy, through the mouths of the Preacher and the Civilian. Some understanding of these views is the best preparation for seeing the Merchant of Venice. ‘What is more against nature then that money should beget or bring forth money, which was ordeined to be a pledge betwixt man and man . . . and not to increase itselfe as a woman doth that bringeth foorthe a childe, cleane contrarye to the firste institution of money’: and again ‘Nature cannot afoord yt that once one of dead things should become twice one’. I have ventured to italicize five words here because they reveal the whole point of the scene where Shylock attempts to justify his trade by Jacob’s genetic stratagem with the flocks. The difference between cattle, which breed by nature, and dead things is the crux of the whole matter and Shylock blandly displays his incurable blindness. Throughout the Discourse there is real learning, real thought, and some passion. The style is occasionally adorned with verbal tricks (‘These be marmaides not merchants’) or with alliteration (‘As deafe as a doore nayle, as blynde as a bittle’) but is in general plain though by no means artless.

The possibilities of the dialogue were explored further by William Bullein (ob. 1576). Most of his works were purely medical and so belong to the history of science rather than to that of literature, and when in these the dialogue form is used it provides only the thinnest gilding for the pill. In the New book Entitled the Government of Health, which was finished in 1558, one of the characters promises well enough when he begins by attempting to dismiss his importunate adviser with the words ‘What good sir I require not your counsell, I pray you be your owne caruer’, but by the end he has become a dutiful ‘feed’ (in the theatrical sense) asking such questions as ‘What be cloues, Galangell, and pepper?’ Once, however, Bullein attempted to combine pleasure with profit in a full-blown Erasmian ‘Colloquy’, the Dialogue . . . against the fever Pestilence (1564). This is a tantalizing book. In Bullein’s hands the form bids fair to rival the novel and the drama as a mirror of life. He is free of several different social circles, describes the country as well as the town, and keeps in action five major characters who, if far from Shakespearian, are not far from Jonsonian. Volpone, indeed, may be indebted to the Dialogue. Yet Bullein never seems to understand what excellences were within his reach. One reason is that he was trying to do too many things at once. He wanted to write prescriptions against the Plague, satire against usurers, satire against lawyers, a Protestant tract, a catalogue of Emblems, and a Dance of Death. These designs were not harmonized. The terrible scene at the deathbed of Avarus (half farce and whole tragedy) is spoiled because the Doctor, from being a real and sinister character, presently becomes a mere lecturer on physic. Theologus at the bedside of Civis (which had promised to be most moving) fails both as a character and a comforter because a systematic compendium of Protestant theology is forced into his mouth. Civis’s man, the hitherto delightful Roger, is made to deliver a diatribe on usury which is out of character. Yet what comes through between these incidences of doctrinal corvée is good enough to make us demand more. Civis himself, the kind husband of a close-fisted wife, is nearly always natural and we are made to love him. The wife is not much inferior to some of More’s sketches. Mendax, recounting his voyage to Terra Florida, is an amusing member of the Munchausen family. The change from London to the country is sensitively imagined, Roger’s fable delightfully told. The last scene in which Civis finds that his flight from London has been in vain and meets Mors in person, though it conforms to a familiar pattern, is so managed that we feel surprise and horror. Death’s speech has real eloquence, and some of the references to rural sights and sounds have the freshness of Izaak Walton. But neither of these two passages is typical of Bullein’s manner, which is studiously simple. His scenes of low life are less racy and his decorations rarer than we might expect: not, I think, through any defect of power but because Terence and Erasmus are his models. He aims, not unsuccessfully, at something as easy as real conversation but a shade more elegant. His prose is, like Gascoigne’s, a civilized prose. This, together with his invention and his knowledge of human nature, puts him above many writers of the period whose names are better known. Hence, ungratefully, we read him with an irritation which Ascham or Harpsfield do not arouse; he might so easily have been better. It is like seeing a man throw away a good hand at cards.

I have placed Bullein immediately after Wilson because Wilson in my opinion should be remembered as a writer of colloquy rather than as a teacher of rhetoric. In the latter capacity he had, however, predecessors and successors of whom some ought perhaps to be mentioned.

Richard Sherry, a schoolmaster, finished his Treatise of Schemes and Tropes in 1550, and though the Rhetoric of Leonard Cox had appeared in 1524 regards himself as a pioneer, his title ‘straunge vnto our Englyche eares’ and likely to be scorned as ‘newe fangle’. In his preface he observes that the De Oratore is not of much practical use because Cicero ‘wyth his incomperable eloquence hath so hid the preceptes’; an admission which, one would have thought, might have given a teacher of rhetoric some uneasiness. The earlier and more general parts of Sherry’s book are badly done. We understand what he means by the ‘great’, ‘small’, and ‘meane’ kinds only because we have seen them exemplified and better explained elsewhere: if we relied on Sherry himself we should be completely mystified. Later, when he tabulates and defines the schemes and figures, he becomes tolerably clear. He has also the good sense to warn us that we should always speak ‘wyth as playne wordes as may be’ and notes in the margin ‘A figure not to be vsed but for a cause.’ His own prose style is mediocre, but his Treatise, as a practical handbook, is, I believe, better than Wilson’s Art.

Richard Rainold in his Foundation of Rhetoric (1563) hardly attempts to rival Wilson (whom he mentions with respect) for it consists almost entirely of specimen orations. These were intended to teach more than rhetoric, being devoted to ‘soche questions as are right necessarie to be knowen’, and ballasted with ‘vertuous precepts’ and ‘famous Histories’. Their construction will teach us ‘copiously to dilate any matter’. This promise is well kept. Thus, if you begin with Aesop’s fable of the wolves who persuaded the shepherds to kill their dogs, you can first tell the fable at length, and then expound the moral at length, and then digress into the natural history of wolves (and sheep), and then re-tell the fable at greater length including a speech by the Chief Wolf . . . and so forth. Yet even this foolish book can teach us something. Much light is thrown on Elizabethan methods of composition by Rainold’s passage on the figure Chria. A Chria is ‘a rehearsall in fewe wordes of any one fact or of the saying of any man vpon the whiche an occasion can be made’. Hence those countless sentences which begin ‘Diogenes seeing a boie wanton’ or the like; hence too the immense value to our ancestors of books like Laertius and Plutarch. For Chria is a hungry figure.

Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence which appeared in 1577 is probably the best of the books on rhetoric. It is a systematic (not alphabetical) lexicon of the rhetorician’s terms, with clear definitions and examples. I think one could really learn the art from this book, as one could not from Wilson’s or Rainold’s. As we read his pages we perceive how the rhetorical standpoint, once adopted, accounts (in one sense) for everything that can be said or written and thus (in another sense) excludes nearly everything. Those accidents which we call Spoonerisms are for Peacham the scheme Hypallage; poetical forms of words (such Dian for Diana) are schemes orthographical. The trope Metonimia, which puts ‘the inuentor for the thing inuented’ is exemplified by ‘Neptune for the sea’ and ‘In Christ, for in the fayth of Christ’. It is doubtful if most pagans would be satisfied with the first, or most Christians with the second, example.

More interesting than the rhetoricians is Thomas Harman, of whose life we know little. His Caveat or Warning for Common Cursetours (1567) reveals him as a hard, inquisitive man with one literary gift and no literary standards. Where he is trying to be literary, as in his dedication, he relies on Berners’s trick of synonyms (‘relief, succour, comforte, and sustentacion’) or hunts the letter (‘peuishe, peltinge and prickinge parasites’). In the body of his work these decorations rarely appear. His book belongs to that literature of roguery which has crossed our path once or twice before and which had been enriched (probably before 1566) by the Manifest Detection of Dice Play, attributed by an early scholiast to one Gilbert Walker. This is a work of considerable literary merit. The author’s intentions were perhaps wholly serious but as he paints his cheats and sets them talking in a lifelike manner an effect of comedy is produced. In 1560 came the Fraternity of Vacabonds, a short dictionary of cant, printed and perhaps written by one Awdeley. Harman goes far beyond his predecessors. His first page is not promising but almost at once the stories begin and on them the whole literary value of his book depends. They grow better and better as he proceeds. At first we are not quite sure whether he sees how funny they are; there is considerable naïveté in the account (xi, xii) of his own amateur detective work, regrettably carried out by the private and unauthorized torture of a suspect. But our doubts are allayed by the great story in chapter xix. Here, it is important to notice, some of the best scenes could not have been witnessed either by Harman or by his informant. This ruins Harman’s claim to be a serious sociologist. Those scenes must be invention. But if they are Harman’s invention, his place in the history of fiction, though very small, is secure. His dialogue, too, can be exquisitely natural—‘Now by my trouth I knowe not, quoth she, you bring me out of my tale so, you do’. Yet when he writes in his own person you might often take him for little better than a dunce. It would seem impossible for a man to lose his construction in sentences so short and unpretentious as Harman’s, yet Harman contrives to do it. But he used his single talent well: he has set before us rogues who talk so that they could mix undetected among the rogues of Shakespeare. For the misery behind the roguery he shows no more pity than a stone; though he claims (as such men always do) to have reached his present state of mind after having often given and been often deceived.

Edmund Tilney’s Brief and pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage (1568) is in its way a more ambitious specimen of the Dialogue than Wilson’s or Bullein’s. The model was perhaps Castiglione. We set off in the florid manner of the Complaynt of Scotland (‘What time Flora had clothed the earth’, &c.) and are conducted with much circumstance to the house of a certain Lady Julian. A rich background of palaces and gardens is painted and we find Vives and Erasmus among the company. Neither of them, however, has much to say and Tilney’s actual teaching about marriage is too short and homely to justify its elaborate setting. The ladies’ speeches are the liveliest. The book is interesting as an unsuccessful attempt to create that world of courtesy which we find in Sidney’s romance or in Lyly’s or Shakespeare’s comedies.

Among historians and antiquaries (whom I shall treat together) John Bale (1495–1563) comes first in time. His doggerel tragedy King John will be dealt with in another volume. His value as an antiquary is best seen in the Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum Summarium (1548) and the later Catalogus (1557) and also in his surviving notes on the same subject. Here Bale is sincerely concerned with fact, and is free both from literary adornment and scurrility, which elsewhere, for Bale, are much the same thing. In his published vernacular works he is the most vitriolic of the Protestant controversialists, and enriches the vocabulary of abuse with the words prostybulous and bluddering. His Acts of English Votaries (1546), provoked by some extreme disparagements of matrimony on the Roman side, attempts to show that those who embrace the celibate life are nearly always ‘whoremongers’ or ‘most fylthie Gomorreans’. The charge is not confined to popish celibates; the Vestal Virgins, and even the Druids, were no better than they should be. The book, however, is not so prurient as this kind of propaganda has often been, and at times, as in his discussion on Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins, his concern is, in part, genuinely historical. Much better are the Brief Chronicle Concerning Sir John Oldcastle (1544) or the First Examination (1546) and Latter Examination (1547) of Anne Askew. The parallel between Oldcastle and Becket shows Bale’s polemical abilities at their best, but in the Askew pamphlets his prose, though readable, cannot stand up to the simple words of the martyr herself:

Then they did put me on the rack because I confessed no ladies or gentlewomen to be of my opinion: and because I lay still and did not cry, my lord chancellor and Master Rich took pains to rack me in their own hands.

Perhaps the most interesting thing we can discover in Bale, as in Leland’s Assertio inclytissimi Arturii (1544), is the emergence of a theory by which Arthur was regarded almost as a Protestant and thus rescued for Spenser and Milton from the disfavour in which Protestant humanism had plunged him. ‘The Romysh Byshop sought all meanes possyble to vphold the Englysh Saxons in a Kyngedome falselye gotten, the Britaynes hatynge hym for yt.’ The Augustinian church was ‘rather polytyke’ than ‘Christian’ and this, as Leland argues, explains Bede’s silence about Arthur. As for Polydore Vergil’s skepticism, ‘no men are learned with him but Italians’ says Bale in his Oldcastle.

If we deny that John Leland himself (1506?–52) is an author in the literary historian’s sense of the word, we intend no quarrel with those who will maintain that he is something quite as good. He first (and last) held the office of King’s Antiquary, and great things were expected of him, but the magnum opus on our histories and antiquities for which he undertook all his journeys was never written. His voluminous manuscript notes, which supplied much to Bale, Stow, Harrison, and Holinshed, survive in the famous Itinerary (English) and Collectanea (Latin). The jottings of the Itinerary, never intended for the public, are not without their charm. ‘Soone after I enterid, withyn the space of a Myle or lesse, ynto the very thik of the woddy Forest of Shirwood where ys great game of Deer’—it is almost as good as a sentence of Malory. But it is most unlikely that if he had written the book he intended, it would have had any such beauties. His short English address to Henry VIII—The Laborious Journey and Search . . . given . . . as a New Year’s Gift (1549)—is florid and heavy in accordance with the demands of an age when ‘a florishing style’ was ‘yn such estimation that except truethe be delicately clothid yn purpure her written Verites can scant finde a Reader’; and in the Assertio he puts a Livian oration into Arthur’s mouth. As an antiquary he has been generally praised by his successors, and though he seems to have defaced at York Minster in 1534 an inscription displeasing to Government, there is no doubt that he was in general a zealous rescuer of materials which the Dissolution had endangered. Some, he tells us, were already finding their way out of the country. Though a vocal Protestant when the time came, he had enjoyed Clement VII’s dispensation to hold four benefices, and has none of Bale’s scurrility. Sometimes in his work, as in Bale’s, we can see northern and western scholarship becoming restive under the long dominance of the Italians. His Latin poetry has been praised, but I cannot think that a man who would use such a metre as the hendecasyllable for a poem seven hundred lines long was really very sensitive.

Thomas Cooper (1517?–94) whose theological work I reserve for a later chapter, continued to the reign of Edward VI the world chronicle which Thomas Lanquet had left unfinished at his death in 1545, and published this composite work in the Epitome of Chronicles in 1549. Both authors are mere annalists and added nothing either to the science or the art of history. Their book was reissued with a continuation by the poetaster Robert Crowley in 1559. Richard Grafton, whose Abridgement (1563) was followed by the Chronicle at Large in 1569, has already received such mention as he needs. He had the audacity to enter into historical controversy (impar congressus) with the great John Stow (1525–1605). This ‘merry old man’, footing it over England in search of antiquities because he could never learn to ride, sometimes suspected by Government of being insufficiently Protestant, now begging with a basin in the street, now spending £200 a year on his library, holds a very high place in the history of learning. Even those who, like Camden, distrusted his judgement, allowed his industry. His Chaucer (1561) was his first but by no means his best work: he helped to swell the Chaucerian apocrypha. His Summary of English Chronicles (1565) looks at first like a retrogression from Hall; we are back at the annalistic form and the London tradition with its lists of bailiffs and mayors. But the important thing is that Stow is not a mere compiler but (as we call it) a ‘researcher’. He uses the literary sources but he adds ‘paynfull searche’ into records, and ‘diligent experience’. He collected not only books but charters and legal documents. He bought up the collections of others, and his own assisted both Speght and Parker. In 1580 came the Chronicle of England from Brute vnto this present year, re-issued in 1592 as the Annals. The Survey of London (1598) was re-issued in 1603 and afterwards enlarged by other hands. Its modern editor finds this work ‘instinct with’ a ‘life’ which the Annals lack. It is a treasure-house of old customs, old splendours, old gaieties and hospitalities, already vanished or vanishing when the author wrote. Stow had no stylistic ambitions; his works were, as he said, ‘written homely’. His prose varies between mere note-making (see the account of printing under year 1458 in the Summary) and tolerably vivid narrative. In general it is just such an unobtrusive medium as keeps our attention on the facts, and therefore good for its purpose; recte olet ubi nihil olet.

The good fame of John Foxe (1517–87) has had many vicissitudes. In his own time he was, naturally, attacked from the Roman side by John Harding in 1565 and by Harpsfield under the pseudonym of Alan Cope in his Sex Dialogi (1566). Among Protestants he soon acquired and long retained almost scriptural authority, but in 1837 the work of S. R. Maitland ushered in a violent reaction. Maitland had many successors and the nineteenth-century tradition represents Foxe as an unscrupulous propagandist who records what he knows to be false, suppresses what he knows to be true, and claims to have seen documents he has not seen. In 1940, however, Mr. J. F. Mozley re-opened the whole question and defended Foxe’s integrity, as it seems to me, with complete success. From his examination Foxe emerges, not indeed as a great historian, but as an honest man. For early Church history he relies on the obvious authorities and is of very mediocre value. For the Marian persecution his sources are usually the narratives of eyewitnesses. Such narratives, whispered in secret during a Terror and emulously proclaimed as soon as the Terror is over, are liable to distortion. Men who have seen their friends die in torture are not always inspired by that coolly scientific spirit which the academic researcher so properly demands. But there seems no evidence that Foxe ever accepted what he did not himself believe or ever refused to correct what he had written in the light of fresh evidence. The most horrible of all his stories, the Guernsey martyrdoms, was never refuted, though violently assailed; in some ways the defence may be thought scarcely less damaging than the charge. And in one respect—in his hatred of cruelty—Foxe was impartial to a degree hardly paralleled in that age. His earliest original work, the De Non Plectendis Morte Adulteris (1548) is a plea for mercy; he confesses that he could never pass a slaughterhouse without discomposure, and when his own party was on top he interceded (vainly, of course) to save Anabaptists from the stake in 1575 and Jesuits from the gallows in 1581.

Foxe’s enormous influence is curiously out of proportion to his actual status as an English man of letters. Latin was the medium he preferred. The first form taken by his Martyrology was the Commentarii published at Strassburg in 1554, which dealt mainly with the Lollards. This was enlarged to include the Marian persecution and published as Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum . . . Commentarii at Basel in 1559. The Acts and Monuments of 1563 contains a translation (not by Foxe) of the Rerum and adds masses of new material which had poured in on him since his return to England. The narratives of others are sometimes reproduced verbatim, sometimes abridged, sometimes conflated. The Ecclesiastical History (1570) extends the story back to Apostolic times and abridges (not always judiciously) the later periods. It will be seen, therefore, that it is only in the earlier portions of the 1570 text that we have long stretches of pure Foxian English composition as distinct from Foxe translated by others or Foxe working with scissors and paste. This section is in every way the least valuable part of his work and his English style has no high merits. The sentences have not energy to support their great length. In the Marian parts, as in Malory, we find plenty of good reading without being able to trace our pleasure confidently to any single author’s skill. But the composite result is by no means to be neglected. Many excellent scenes recur to the mind: Jullins Palmer talking to his mother, Mrs. Wardall’s lodger coming to the window to explain that she is a stranger in these parts and is afraid of spirits walking by night, Mr. Lewes making a sumner eat his citation. Better than all is the moment at which Elizabeth Folkes, stripping for the fire and prevented by the police from giving her petticoat to her mother, flings it away with the words, ‘Farewell all the world! Farewell Faith, farewell Hope, welcome Love!’

If Foxe is primarily, Matthew Parker (1504–75) is almost exclusively, a neo-Latin author. His great work De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae (1572) hardly concerns us, but he deserves grateful memory from all English scholars as one of the pioneers in the study of Anglo-Saxon.

Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577 and 1587) are all that survives of a far more ambitious scheme, a ‘universall cosmographie’ with ‘histories of euery knowne nation’, projected many years earlier by Reyne (or Reginald) Wolfe, printer to Queen Elizabeth. At Wolfe’s death in 1573 his successors reduced the design to a history and geography of the British Isles. The work was carried out by Raphael Holinshed, Richard Stanyhurst, John Hooker (alias Vowell), Francis Thynne, and William Harrison. It defies the ordinary methods of literary criticism for a reason which an example will make clear. ‘Holinshed’ describing the preliminaries to the battle of Crecy writes:

When euerie man was gotten into order of battell, the king leapt vpon a white hobbie and rode from ranke to ranke to view them, the one Marshall on his right hand and the other on his left, desiring euerie man that daie to haue regard to his right and honour.

Turn back to Grafton at the same place and you will read:

When all these battayles were set in an order, then the king lept on a Hobby with a whyte rodde in his hande, one of his Marshalles on the one hande, and another on the other hande, and he road from ranke to ranke, desyring euery man to take heede that day to his right and honour.

Turn back again to Berners’s Froissart and you find:

Then the king lept on a hobby with a whyte rodde in his hande, one of his Marshalls on the one hande, and the other on the other hande; he rode from ranke to ranke desyringe euerie man to take heede that daie to his right and honour.

Clearly there is nothing that can be called original composition except in Froissart: yet at the same time Grafton and Holinshed are not exactly transcribing. We are in a world where our modern notions of authorship do not apply. I do not promise that ‘Holinshed’ everywhere follows its predecessors quite so closely as this, though I could quote places where it is as close to Hall. The point is that no one can pronounce any sentence to be pure Holinshed until he has looked at the corresponding place in every previous chronicler. That is work for an editor; the literary historian must be content to warn the student that at this period a new chronicle is not necessarily what we should call a new book. The ‘English story’ is a sort of national stock-pot permanently simmering to which each new cook adds flavouring at his discretion.

There is, however, one part of ‘Holinshed’ which can be treated as the original work of a single author. The parson William Harrison (1534–93) had already been engaged on a Chronology when he was invited to supply the ‘cosmographicall’ part of the new venture and thus came to write his celebrated Description of Britain. In some respects he was not very well qualified for the work. His account of Scotland is merely an Anglicization of Bellenden’s Scots version of Boece. Even in England he was not a great traveler and researcher like Leland or Stow. He relies on many sources—Leland himself, Smith, Bale, Harman, Humphrey Lloyd, Dr. Caius On English Dogs, and that inaccurate but never uninteresting authority, ‘old men yet dwelling in the village where I remain’. But he was clearly a great questioner and listener and produced a book which has much historical value.

For the general reader his value is higher still. He is the most Herodotean of our writers; a cheerful gossip. Some of his digressions—and he often has to pull himself up with a ‘But whither am I digressed?’—are perhaps scarcely to modern taste; we may doubt whether in an account of Elizabethan shipping ‘It shall not be amisse to begin at the nauie of Xerxes’ (II. xvii), or whether English meals need to be compared to those of the Romans, Greeks, Persians, ‘Canariens’, Indians, Caspians, and Tyrhenians (II. vi). But then most moderns will be delighted with his passage on brewing (his wife’s recipe included) for which he seems to apologize; ‘beare with me, gentle reader (I beseech thee) that lead thee from the description of the plentiful diet of our countrie . . . into a mustie malthouse: but such is now thy hap, wherefore I praie thee be contented’ (ibid.). The confiding tone is characteristic. Whatever else Harrison gives us, he always gives us himself; his devout love for both universities, his dislike of Italian travels, his scarce acquaintance ‘with any siluer at all, much lesse then (God it wot) with any store of gold’, his honest pride in his garden, his distrust of the potato. On the strength of one sentence (‘When our houses were builded of willow, then had we oken men’, II. xxii) he has sometimes been set down as a laudator temporis acti. This is unjust. Of the changes that had occurred within living memory, Harrison thinks, as in most periods a man of sense must think, that some were for the worse and some for the better. He believes that our ‘husbandmen and artificers’ were ‘neuer so excellent in their trades as at this present’ (II. v), thanks God that the number of meals has been reduced to two a day (II. vi), and mentions the improved table furniture in nearly all classes of society not ‘in reproche of anie man, God is my iudge, but to shew that I do reioyse rather to see how God has blessed vs’ (II. xii). He is delighted at recent progress in horticulture and thinks that our modern gardens probably surpass those of the Hesperides (II. xx). Though he is no friend to excessive troops of serving men he can enjoy their liveries, ‘to see them muster at court, which, being filled with them, dooth yield the contemplation of a notable varietie vnto the beholder, much like to the shew of the pecocks taile in the full beautie’ (II. xv). If, on the debit side, he laments deforestation, rising rents and prices, oppression of small holders, increasing poverty and rings in markets, no doubt he had good reason.

For our purpose Harrison’s style is no less important than his matter; in reading him we find that we have quite clearly emerged from the Drab Age. This impression is all the stronger and more reliable because he is not one, like Hall or Ascham, who is consciously labouring to improve our prose. ‘I neuer made any choise of stile or words’, he says in his preface, and refers to his work as a thing ‘scambled up’, a ‘foule frizeled Treatise’. And this is true. He is an inartificial writer like More, Roper, or Brinkelow. Yet he is very different from them. A new familiar style has arisen; a brisk, cheerful, voluble style. Roper and Harrison both suggest talk, but where Roper suggests a man talking slowly, Harrison suggests a man talking quickly. More’s drollery requires the grave tone and even the drudging pace of his sentences: it is irresistibly comic because the funniest things are said with a straight face. Harrison’s jokes are high spirited and effervescent. In the Drab Period nearly all prose writers sound middle-aged; in Harrison we recover that spirit of youthfulness which is often characteristic of the ‘Golden’ period. A hostile critic could say of Harrison, as no one could possibly say of Harpsfield or Cheke, that he prattles. It is less important that we should criticize than that we should perceive the change—whether we describe it by saying that the fog has lifted, or that the age of the martyrs has given place to that of the fantasticals, or that Mercury has succeeded Saturn. Not comparing the two orders, but considering Harrison as a specimen of the new, we must praise him. His sentences are long and sometimes (note that which introduces the quotation from Agrippa in II. xv) he loses his way, but when he does not they have great liveliness. In general he has the ‘easie ambling pace’ which he attributes to a good gelding, ‘pleasant and delectable’ to the rider’s ear (III. i). Much that now pleases us flows, no doubt, less from his own talent than from the common language of the age. The very names which he mentions for strong beer are a sort of mental carouse—Huffcap, Go-by-the-Wall, Mad Dog, and Merry-go-down (II. xviii).

From historians I turn to translators of whom the earliest and most memorable is Thomas North (1535–1601?). His Dial of Princes renders Guevara’s Libro Aureo from an intermediate French version. It appeared in 1557 and again in 1563 with a so-called ‘fourth booke’, really a translation of Guevara’s Aviso de Privados. The abandoned theory which traced euphuism to North’s Guevara has perhaps given this book a place in literary history which it hardly deserves. Sentences that anticipate Lyly can be found in it, but not more often than in Hall and less often than in Ascham. Lyly’s real debt to Guevara is for matter not for style. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579) is very much more important. It is not a scholarly production. North works from the French of Amyot (1559) which he sometime misunderstands, and Amyot had sometimes misunderstood the Greek. Plutarch himself was not a scientific nor (in our sense) a philosophical historian. The process of history is not his concern and he has little sense of period; mythical heroes and well-known statesmen are treated in much the same way. Heroic gossip is his line—the striking reversal of fortune, the curious anecdote, the apophthegm, the examples of vices and virtues. For this very reason he suited the Elizabethans far better than Thucydides; his love of pageantry and his monotheistic piety, added to the attraction. He furnished their picture of antiquity with traits at least as important as those provided by the ancient poets. The Renascentia did not people our imagination exclusively, nor chiefly, with gods and goddesses, or shepherds and nymphs. From Plutarch (and Laertius) comes that almost oppressive crowd of generals, sages, courtesans, politicians, soothsayers, and noble dames who haunt the Essais and the Anatomy. It was a picture without historical perspective, in which the ‘ancients’ were all of a piece. It was not even a ‘costume’ picture; by the time we reach North’s English, flamens are ‘bishops’ and chariots are ‘carts’. This helped the examples and the maxims, whether magnanimous or Machiavellian, to strike home. It is thus, not as a model of form but as a storehouse of matter, that ancient literature produced its deepest effect.

Of North as an English writer Charles Whibley said, ‘He held a central place in the history of our speech’ and ‘he played upon English prose as upon an organ whose every stop he controlled with an easy confidence’. This seems to me excessive: I know no writer of whom it could be said with strict truth. But North’s prose is lively, idiomatic, and masculine in rhythm. Some passages perhaps seem more eloquent than they are because we cannot read them without remembering what Shakespeare made of them by small but momentous changes. But the word small is important; what Shakespeare had to work on was already good.

As Plutarch’s Lives built the heroic ideal of the Elizabethan age, Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (1528), translated by Sir Thomas Hoby in 1561, built their courtly ideal. This is another of those books which mark and, I hope, justify my distinction between a Drab and a ‘Golden’ Age. Anyone who compares the Courtier with Elyot’s Governor or Erasmus’s Institutio will see what I mean. The courtly ideal has its own severities and Castiglione can even speak of the ‘horrible face of true vertue’, much as Horace speaks of the atrocem animum Catonis. Yet this ‘Vertue’ remains a mistress, not a schoolmistress, to gentle hearts; and what is a mistress without Daungier? Its ardour and delight in the pursuit of ideal conduct make the Courtier an attractive book. Here, as in Harrison’s Description, but on a far higher level, we see the air and fire of youth chasing away the staidness of the Drab Age. Even old men, as Castiglione explains, can still be lovers in their proper mode. And he has a right to sound youthful for his book really marks a rejuvenation or re-birth, though a different one from the renascentia in its proper sense. He is retrieving, with modifications, the medieval ideal; the knight and lover who might, to our endless loss, have been simply rejected in favour of the half Plutarchan, half Machiavellian, Great Man, is recalled and refashioned and set forward on a new career, with the characters of poet, patron, and philosopher now added to him. For Castiglione’s art of courtly life is not a mere moyen de parvenir. The courtier is not judged by his success in winning the prince’s favour; the prince is judged by his worthiness to have such a courtier. And though all is serious, all is graceful, spontaneous, unconstrained. In his picture of a court he creates (at least for literature) what he preaches. The stage is set for Pamela, Florimel, and Viola. Hoby’s translation does little justice to the golden manner of the original, but the golden content gets through. He prints Cheke’s foolish letter about ‘pure, unmixt’ English, but I do not think it influenced his practice.

Of the theologians who might be mentioned in this chapter I reserve Thomas Cartwright for later treatment. John Jewel (1522–71) is of great importance for his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1562) but not for his vernacular writings. These include sermons, a commentary on Thessalonians, and a jungle of controversies to which he rashly committed himself by his so-called Challenge Sermon in 1559. This is close fighting and seldom without interest, but stands at about the same distance from literature proper as the debates in Hansard. One passage is worth noting. ‘Ye teach the people’, says Jewel to his Roman adversary, ‘thus to pray vnto the Blessed Virgin, Monstra te esse matrem, command thy son, vse thy motherly authority ouer him, let him know thee to be his mother. This you say is no blasphemy but a spiritual dallying. Now verily, M. Harding, this must needs be a blessed kind of diuinity that can turne prayer into dalliance.’ Here I suppose Jewel and Thomas Harding to be equally sincere and equally shocked. They are divided by a difference of devotional temper which sharpened, and had perhaps long preceded, the strictly doctrinal differences. One of Jewel’s very minor works in Latin, the early Oratio contra Rhetoricam would be of great literary interest if we could be sure that it was seriously intended. We should have to salute a man who stood almost alone in maintaining that rhetorical study is a total waste of time, that rhetoricians are neither better understood nor more believed than natural speakers, and that an art which bad causes need far more than good ones is the ruin of states. The Oratio has been so taken by an eminent scholar, but I cannot agree with him. What first awakes suspicion is the absence of all arguments drawn from religion. Its whole atmosphere is that of literary paganism. And towards the end we find a passage which, from such a man at such a date, must surely be ironical. It might be translated thus:

Our owne country men not many yeares sithence whan they had no shadowe, I saie not of eloquence but of verie Latine and clene language, whan Cicero lay despised and scorned in kennels and darke corners and Scotus blocked vp the gate and entrie of all the scholes, how well learned neuerthelater, of how sharpe iudgment in philosophie, how graue in diuinity they were esteemde? Oh blessed vniversitie! Oh the goode worlde! For than naught might be done against oure sentence, than might we make peace and warre and stirre vp tumultes and sette prynces by the eares.

What can this be but an insinuation that none could seriously attack (as Jewel has been ostensibly attacking) the new Ciceronianism, unless he were a Papist and a scholastic? The whole Oratio is a laboured academic joke of the kind not then uncommon. Jewel was no more seriously condemning rhetoric than Erasmus was seriously praising folly.

Anne Lady Bacon who translated his Apologia in 1564 deserves more praise than I have space to give her. Latin prose has a flavour very hard to disguise in translation, but nearly every sentence in Lady Bacon’s work sounds like an original. Again and again she finds the phrase which, once she has found it, we feel to be inevitable. Sacrificuli become ‘massing priests’, ineptum ‘a verie toy’, quidam ex asseclis et parasitis ‘one of his soothing pages and clawebackes’, lege sodes ‘in goode fellowshipe I pray thee reade’, operae pretium est videre ‘it is a world to see’, and magnum silentium ‘all mum, not a worde’. If quality without bulk were enough, Lady Bacon might be put forward as the best of all sixteenth-century translators.

The literature of exploration and travel, soon to be so copious, was stimulated during this period both by recent adventure and by the example of such works as Fernandez de Oviedo’s Summario (1526), Ramusio’s Navigationi (1550), and Lopez de Gomára’s Istoria de las Indias (1552). The slaver John Hawkins in his True Declaration (1569) tells a plain tale of shipping blacks from Africa and selling them, sometimes with the help of a little gunnery, in Spanish America; deploring incidentally the low standards of international morality among ‘negrose’ and Spaniards. His prose is free from affectation but shows no remarkable strength or race. Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Discourse (1576) has for modern readers an accidental charm which is hard to resist. In it we recapture the moment, so rich in suggestion, at which ancient tradition or myth and recent exploration seemed on the point of joining hands; when ‘Plato in Timaeo’, Philo, Cartier, and Cabot could all equally be called as witnesses. Considered more objectively, it is a workmanlike essay, well arranged, well informed, and free from rhetoric. Richard Eden (1521?–1576) was a diligent translator of geographical works, censured by the purists for words ‘smellyng to much of the Latine’, such as ponderous, portentous, despicable, and destructive. He tells us something of contemporary taste by his modest admission, ‘I haue not for euery worde asked counsayle of eloquent Eliot or Sir Thomas More’; and in his pages Shakespeare found the name Setebos. His collected works were edited and ‘augmented’ as the History of Travel in 1577 by one Richard Willes who is probably Spenser’s ‘pleasant Willy’ in the Tears of the Muses, the neo-Latin poet Ricardus Willeius. This same Willes is the author of three pieces which can be read in Hakluyt and which betray stylistic ambitions. His most interesting production is, however, his preface to the History of Travel, for here, to the best of my knowledge, we first meet that type of advertisement, since so common, which may be called chronological intimidation. Willes would have us buy his book because geography is the science of the future, because we are entering upon the geographical age. ‘There was a time whan the arte of grammar was so muche esteemed. . . . Than was it honourable to be a Poet . . . that tyme is paste. There was a tyme whan Logike and Astrology so weeried the heades of young schollers . . . that tyme is past. Not long since happy was he that had any skil in the Greke language.’ But we have changed all that, and now ‘all Christians, Iewes, Turkes, Morres, Infidels and Barbares be this day in loue with Geographie’.

But these works are of minor interest. What the lover of voyages really wants first appears in George Beste’s True Discourse (1578), a subordinate officer’s first-hand account of Frobisher’s three attempts to find the North-West Passage and (what interested Elizabeth more) a gold-mine in Meta Incognita. Here, as Beste promises us, we can learn both ‘how dangerous it is to attempt new Discoueries’ and also ‘how pleasant and profitable’. The scientific preface—a close argument to prove that all zones are habitable—is, no doubt, superseded in manner as well as in matter; this is one of the kinds of literature which we do better than the Elizabethans. But the narrative is of a very high order. Everything is as it should be. The motive attributed to Frobisher is heroical, ‘to accomplish or bring true certificate of the truth, or els never to returne againe, knowing this to be the only thing of the world that was left yet vndone whereby a notable minde might be made famous and fortunate’. The author’s generous admiration for his leader heightens his whole work. He has that unemphatic and commonsensible piety which could now hardly be expressed without self-consciousness, telling how they escaped imminent danger in the ice ‘God being our best Steresman and by the industry of Charles Jackman and Andrew Dyer’. Many a frightful landscape is brought vividly, and effortlessly, before us in a few words. The praise and blame which he allots to his comrades carry conviction. A malicious reader might whisper that Beste’s own speech and conduct are by no means hidden under a bushel; but then, as Johnson says of Dryden, ‘while he forces himself upon our esteem, we cannot refuse him to stand high in his own’. His book is so delightful that on a first reading we are tempted to exclaim that the thing could be not be better done. But we must keep our heads. This kind of Elizabethan prose, though full of sap, is yet not quite a perfect medium. Beste is a master of the phrase; not so completely a master of the sentence. The multiplication of subordinate clauses sometimes blurs the effect. Defoe could write, on the whole, a little better. But though we must keep our heads we must also be grateful for meeting (at last) an author who can tempt us to lose them.

The novella, from which matter had often been borrowed before, enters English literature as a form with the work of Painter, Fenton, and Pettie. Of this form the modern critic is apt to make demands which it never attempted to satisfy: he is half angry with the authors for not developing it in the direction of the modern novel. But except in so far as it marks the appearance of story-telling naked and unashamed, story-telling without roots in legend or supposed history, the novella seems to have little connexion with later developments of fiction. It is an elaboration of the oral anecdote. Interest is concentrated on what happened: character, sentiment, manners, and atmosphere exist only for the sake of the event. In English its historical function was not to produce higher forms of fiction but to serve as a dung or compost for the popular drama. Its anecdotal character perhaps explains its tendency to become either licentious or bloodcurdling. Certainly it had been under heavy moral criticism almost from its birth; there is nothing new, and nothing specifically Protestant, in Ascham’s attack on the first English specimens of the genre.

The pure Italian novella came to the hands of Painter and Fenton already modified by a French intermediary, the Histoires Tragiques (1559–82) of Boaistuau and Belleforest. Belleforest had felt that the form invited further developments, but the developments he chose were not those which will appeal to a modern. He was a rhetorician and a moralist and he expanded dialogue and soliloquy, besides interpolating direct diatribe, in the interests of eloquence and edification. Not surprisingly, he is credited by one of his few modern readers with ‘a positive genius for destroying the narrative movement of a story’. But his methods were congenial to sixteenth-century English taste.

William Painter (1540?–94), a civil servant and apparently a swindler, published his Palace of Pleasure in 1566, and a second volume of it in 1567. One of its stories (‘The Horrible and cruel murder of Sultan Solyman’) had appeared separately, about 1558. Other, not very memorable, translations are to his credit. In the Palace we find tales from Cinthio, Plutarch, Margaret of Navarre, and Boccaccio, but more from Bandello through Belleforest. Bandello’s own text Painter rather despised for the ‘barren soile’ of his ‘vain’: it has, indeed, been accused by the Italian critics of Lumbardismi e gallicismi. Painter takes some pains to defend his stories as morally profitable, but also recommends them on the ground that they will ‘recreate and refreshe weried mindes, defatigated either with painefull travaile or with continuall care’. Literary fare ‘for tired business men’ is as old, then, as that; perhaps not much older. Except in his dedicatory epistle where he is a little inclined to ink-horn terms, Painter writes a tolerably plain prose. He includes as ‘novelles’ some things which are only bons mots, and these could hardly be less effectively told. His longer pieces, if you do not happen to know the story already, can be read with moderate pleasure.

All that we know about Geoffrey Fenton (1539?–1608) as a man excites disgust, but he has more claims than Painter to rank as a semi-original author. He published Golden Epistles ‘gathered’ out of Guevara and ‘other Authours Latine, French and Italian’ in 1575, besides translating Etienne Pasquier’s Monophile (1572) and Guicciardini’s History (1579). But his name is chiefly remembered for the Tragical Discourses of 1567. In them Fenton does to Belleforest what Belleforest had already done to Bandello; loads, or stuffs, every rift with rhetorical, proverbial, and moral ore. We must repeatedly remind ourselves that harsh morality was as modish then as flippant immorality in the twenties of our own century; it may be questioned whether the Elizabethan mode was not the more odious of the two. The glib severity of a Fenton or a Lyly has something shocking in it. In a style so rhetorical as Fenton’s nearly every device occurs sooner or later, and it is therefore possible to pick out Euphuisms in the Tragical Discourses. But in general his prose is not, I think, so euphuistic as Ascham’s. It is in the next author on our list that we find something more like the real thing.

George Pettie (1548–89), if we are to believe the prefatory matter to the Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasures, (1576) was responsible neither for the publication nor for the title of that book. A certain R. B. ushers it in with an address to the ‘Gentle Readers whom by my will I woulde haue only Gentlewomen’ and explains that he has pirated a manuscript lent him by the author. His disarming defence is that ‘he cares not to displease twentie men to please one woman’. Then follows the letter which Pettie is supposed to have written to R. B. when he lent him the manuscript. He reminds R. B. that all these stories were told ex tempore ‘in sundrie companies’ and suggests that if the written version seems better than the oral this is probably because the author’s ‘lisping lips’ did not do his composition justice. He also hints that some of them are romans à clef. One would like to believe that the lisp is historical, but it is not necessary to regard the whole affair as anything more than an advertisement. With one exception (Alexius) Pettie’s twelve stories are all drawn from classical sources; chiefly from Ovid and Livy. To complain that they have hardly any narrative vitality is to complain that Pettie has not done what he never intended to do. His art is at the opposite pole from that of the Italian novella. The story interests him solely as a trellis over which to train the flowers of rhetorical soliloquy and tirade: Johnson’s warning to those who read Richardson ‘for the story’ comes to mind. And in Pettie’s rhetoric we find euphuism at last fully developed and more or less continuous. ‘Faithfully without doubting, truely without doublyng, willingly without constraint, ioyfully without complaint’, he writes in his first tale; or again ‘As a stroke or blowe the higher it is lifted the hevier it lightes, so Gods vengeance the longer it is defered, the more it is to be feared’; or in V, ‘It is her bountie not her beutie that bindeth mee, it is her curtesie not her comlinesse that I care for’. Pettie is also a great imitator of the recent English poets and sometimes preserves their metre in his own prose. Thus ‘for like as streames the more ye stop them the higher they flow, and trees the more yee lop them the greater they growe’ reproduces almost verbatim a couplet we have already met in the Mirror for Magistrates. He is a great retailer of proverbs. His translation (through the French of Chappuys) of Stefano Guazzo’s courtesy book La Civile Conversatione (1574) was published in 1586 and contains a spirited rebuke ‘to such curious fellowes who, if one chaunce to derive any woord from the Latine, they foorthwith make a jest at it and terme it an Inke-horne terme’. But it is as the euphuist in embryo that Pettie holds his place in literary history.

We now come to Lyly (c. I553–1606) himself, an author once unjustly celebrated for a style which he did not invent, and now inadequately praised for his real, and very remarkable, achievement. If Lyly had never written Euphues I should have placed him in the next chapter among the ‘Golden’ writers: that fatal success ties him down to the ‘transitional’ category.

The wild goose chase for a particular ‘source’ of euphuism, which began roughly with the publication of Landmann’s Euphuismus in 1881, is now, I take it, pretty well at an end. No literary development, perhaps, can be fully explained but few are less mysterious than this. In the present chapter we have seen its gradual emergence as a structural decoration alternative to the ink-horn decoration of vocabulary and therefore dear to purists. Its elements—antithesis, alliteration, balance, rhyme, and assonance—were not new. They can be found even in More and in the Latin of the Imitation. So far as the elements are concerned we are indeed embarrassed with too many ancestors rather than too few: those who inquire most learnedly find themselves driven back and back till they reach Gorgias. What is added in full blown euphuism is a wealth of pseudo-scientific simile—‘new stones, new Fowles, new Serpents’. Of course that sort of simile neither began nor ended with the euphuists. Chaucer’s reference to hyena’s gall in his Response de Fortune would have delighted Lyly: the ostrich still hides her head in the sand for the convenience of political orators. What constitutes euphuism is neither the structural devices nor the ‘unnatural history’ but the unremitting use of both. The excess is the novelty: the euphuism of any composition is a matter of degree. We are all greatly indebted to a modern scholar for drawing our attention to the Latin orations of Joannes Rainoldus, delivered in the seventies and published as Orationes Duodecim in 1614 and 1619. Reynolds, a scholar of Corpus and tutor of Hooker, was a distinguished man in his day and the orations he delivered as Greek reader at Merton may have been the final and crucial influence upon Lyly, Lodge, Gosson, and others. Read in quotation, he may well appear as the original euphuist. It seems hard to demand more than a sentence like ut videmus herbam Anthemidem quo magis deprimitur eo latius diffundi. But if we sit down to Rainoldus for a whole morning we shall be disappointed. The euphuisms are there but they are not continuous; we wade through many a page of (moderate) Ciceronianism to reach them. The credit—or discredit—of having first kept the thing up for whole pages or decades of pages at a stretch must still, I believe, be given to Lyly. I speak, of course, of ‘euphuism’ as we now understand it; in Lyly’s own time the word referred exclusively to the learned similes.

Euphus itself is related to Lyly’s literary career rather as the Preface of the Lyrical Ballads is related to Wordsworth’s; each marking a temporary aberration, a diversion of the author from his true path, which by its unfortunate celebrity confuses our impression of his genius. John Lyly belongs to a familiar type. He is a wit, a man of letters to his fingertips. He comes of erudite stock. His grandfather is Lyly of the Eton Grammar; his aunt marries two schoolmasters of St. Paul’s in succession and her children have names like Polydore and Scholastica. At Magdalen (Oxford) he is ‘a dapper and deft companion’ much averse to ‘crabbed studies’, behindhand with his battels and (need we add?) very critical of the dons. In our own age he would have been a leading light of the O.U.D.S. and when he went down would have become a producer. And that, in a sense, was what he actually became. He gets some post in the Revels and also at St. Paul’s choir school; officially to teach the children Latin (judging by his own verses, he did it very badly), but unofficially to be dramatist, trainer, and producer to what is, in effect, a theatrical company. To that world of ‘revels’, of pretty, pert, highly trained boys who sing elegant poems to delicious music and enact stories that are ‘ten leagues beyond man’s life’, in dialogue of exquisite and artificial polish, Lyly belongs. There he does (though with much financial discontent) the work that he was born to do. Unfortunately, however, once in his life, Lyly, then resident at the Savoy, anxious about his career, and much concerned to please his patron, the precisian Burleigh, in an evil hour (evil for his lasting fame) had decided to turn moralist. He would write a palinode against excess of wit and other youthful follies. He would line up with Ascham and others against the dangers of Italian travel. Of course such a design was a less violent departure for him than it would be for the same type of intellectual in many other periods. Moral severity was modish as well as prudent. The palinode against wit could be very witty. One did not need to step out of ‘the Movement’ in order to be a censor morum. No moral theology, no experience of life, no knowledge of the human heart were required. The plan had, from his point of view, everything to recommend it, and was carried out in Euphues. The Anatomy of Wit (1578).

I cannot agree with critics who hold that Euphues marks any advance in the art of fiction. For Lyly, as for Pettie, the story is a trellis. The difference is that Pettie’s trellis was an inoffensive thing which you could forget once the roses were in bloom, while Lyly’s is a monstrosity. Euphues betrays his sworn friend in love, is himself betrayed, undergoes a sudden conversion to philosophy, is reconciled (apparently without apology) to the injured friend, and for the rest of the book lectures the friend and the human race on morals in a style which would be rather too lofty for Cato to use to Heliogabalus. It is like seeing the School for Scandal rewritten with Joseph Surface as the hero. It is no kindness to Lyly to treat him as a serious novelist; the more seriously we take its action and characters the more odious his book will appear. Whether Lyly’s moralizing was sincere or no, we need not inquire: it is, in either case, intolerable. The book can now only be read, as it was chiefly read by Lyly’s contemporaries, for the style. It is worst where it is least euphuistic. In the dialogue between Euphues and Atheos euphuism is almost wholly abandoned, and it is here that the confident fatuity of Lyly’s thought becomes most exasperating.

Fortunately Lyly’s didactic fit did not last long. The recovery is already beginning in Euphues and his England (1580). Here Euphues himself remains as detestable as he was before (the unfortunate Philautus is lectured even while seasick) but there are three changes. In the first book Lyly addressed himself only to gentlemen; he now solicits the attention of ladies. In the first book we had a remedium amoris based on a condemnation of all women and therefore unrelated to any possible life in the real world: in the second, honest loves are distinguished from dishonest and the virtuous, though loving, Iffida has a little (a very little) vitality. Finally the narrative element is increased in quantity and improved in quality. In the Anatomy the story had played a very small part, and the book had to be filled out with a dialogue on atheism, a tractate on education (mainly from Plutarch), and numerous letters. In the England there are still plenty of instructive letters, but rather more happens and there are inset stories within the main story. The change must not be exaggerated. Lyly is still more interested in rhetoric than in character or situation; far further from the true novel than Amadis or Huon or Chaucer’s Troilus had been. In the history of fiction his book is not an advance from medieval art but a retrogression. It is, however, an advance from its predecessor. And in becoming less severely didactic Lyly has become, in every sense that matters, more moral. Values that a man might really acknowledge hang about Euphues and his England.

The chief pleasure now to be had from both books is our participation in the author’s obvious enjoyment of his own rhetoric. We despise his sermons; but seeing him so young and brisk, so delightedly preoccupied with the set of his bonnet, the folds of his cloak, and the conduct of his little sword, we feel our hearts softened. But neither Lyly nor euphuism can be fairly judged from the two Euphues books. No style can be good in the mouth of a man who has nothing, or nonsense, to say. It is in the plays that euphuism shows its real value.

The difference may be illustrated by two quotations. Endimion soliloquizing in act II, scene i, says

I am none of those Wolues, that barke most when thou shinest brightest; but that fish (thy fish Cynthia in the floode Arares) which at thy waxing is as white as the driuen snowe, and at thy wayning, as blacke as deepest darknes.

Philautus, at the moment of discovering Euphues’ treachery, says

I see now that as the fish Scolopidus in the floud Araris at the waxinge of the Moone is as white as the driuen snowe, and at the wayning as blacke as the burnt coale, so Euphues, which at the first encreasing of our familyaritie, was very zealous, is nowe at the last cast become most faythlesse.

There are minor differences, no doubt. Deepest darknes is more evocative than burnt coale. The laboured exposition of the analogy in Philautus’ speech leads to a flat anticlimax—very zealous . . . most faythlesse. But the fundamental difference is that Philautus (in angry conversation) is merely talking about the moon, Endimion (in solitary passion) is adoring her; that the relation between this moon-struck fish and the behaviour of Euphues is purely intellectual, while Endimion can identify himself with the fish and his voice breaks at the identification in the parenthesis thy fish Cynthia. Hence Philautus’ simile is frigid; in Endimion’s the crazy exaltation is really suitable to the tale of a man who loved the moon. In Lyly’s novels the euphuistic style is plastered over scenes and emotions (not themselves very interesting) which neither demand nor permit it; in his plays he creates a world where euphuism would be the natural language. And of course the antithesis—what M. Feuillerat calls le tic-tac métronomique of Lyly’s style—is far better in dialogue than it could ever be in narrative. Not infrequently it achieves grandeur: as in ‘He cannot subdue that which is diuine—Thebes was not—Vertue is’ (Campaspe, I. i) or ‘Shee shall haue an ende—so shall the world’ (Endimion, I. i). Let us note in passing that it is here, not in the wretched work of Studley and his colleagues, that the Senecan ‘verbal coup de théâtre’ is really Englished.

The history of drama is not my concern, so I will say nothing of Lyly’s plays as ‘theatre’ beyond recording that when I saw Endimion the courtly scenes (not the weak foolery of Sir Thopas) held me delighted for five acts. But these plays have a literary importance which cannot be passed over in silence without crippling the whole story that this book sets out to tell. Lyly as a dramatist is the first writer since the great medievals whose taste we can trust: the first who can maintain a work of any length qualis ab incepto processerit. Having conceived the imaginary world in which most of his plays are set—whether antique-heroical as in Campaspe or pastoral-Ovidian as in most of the others—he brings everything into keeping. He is consistently and exquisitely artificial. If we miss in him that full-bloodedness which delights a modern in so many Elizabethans, we must remember that it was a quality of which our literature had then too much rather than too little. Belly laughter or graphic abuse could then be supplied by almost everyone; the fault was that they often intruded where they were ruinous. The lightness of Lyly’s touch, the delicacy, the blessed unreality were real advances in civilization. His nymphs and shepherdesses are among the first ladies we have met since the Middle Ages. They have all the character they need; to demand more is like asking to have a portrait head by Reynolds clapped on to a goddess out of Tintoretto. His only serious fault is the weakness of the low comedy scenes between the pages. In Love’s Metamorphosis he omitted the clowns and compensated for their absence by making the heroines a little lighter and more playful. The result is something sweeter and fresher, but hardly less piquant, than Millamant. It is on these bubble-like comedies, not on Euphues nor on his anti-Martinist pamphlet Pappe with a Hatchet, that Lyly’s fame must rest. And they are good, not despite, but by means of, his style. It is the perfect instrument for his purpose, and he can make it pert, grave, tragic, or rapturously exalted. If, as most scholars think, he did not write the admirable songs which appeared in the 1632 collection of Six Court Comedies, he certainly wrote plays exactly fitted to contain those songs. For in the larger and older sense of the word his genius was essentially poetical and his work ‘poesie’. Here is the ‘Golden’ literature at last.

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