It may have occurred to the reader that the words which Ben Jonson quoted about Shakespeare, Sufflaminandus erat—he flowed so freely that he needed stopping—indicate the great fault of Elizabethan and Jacobean Literature. The authors did not know where to stop. The age was luxuriantly rich in genius; and was over-wealthy in new ideas, gained from Greece, Rome, France, Spain, and Italy; from the clash of religions, the discoveries in the new world, and the re-discoveries of the treasures of the old world. What the English poets did not re-discover was the Greek lucidity, brevity, condensation, and orderliness. Even in plays of Shakespeare these graces are lacking: even Shakespeare\'s construction is not his strong point. The intellectual wealth of the poets tempted them to prolixity; the abundance of their ideas provoked them to that fashion of "conceits," of comparisons between the things most remote in heaven, earth, and the world of fancy. There was a taste which reappears now and then in literature, from early Icelandic poetry to Browning and George Meredith, for wilful abruptness, harshness, and obscurity. But industrious prolixity is not the fault of Donne, whom we now approach: his error lay in harshness, obscurity, and a measureless indulgence in conceit. Through these the light which is in him is darkened. Meanwhile rank over-abundance, the inability to stop, renders Daniel and Drayton and Phineas Fletcher burdensome, while Giles Fletcher crowds with conceits and points of wit a poem on the most sacred theme. These poets are not now commonly read, except in selections of their best things, and such selections give no idea of their pervading faults. When we extend our knowledge of the authors, and mark the formless character of the[Pg 284] age in poetry, the sudden appearance of Milton indicates as great a miracle of genius as the existence of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare in the throng of their contemporaries.

John Donne was born in London, in 1573. His father was an eminent ironmonger, of a Catholic family; his mother\'s kin, the Heywoods, had suffered much from Protestant persecution. One of them was the writer of Interludes which amused the melancholy of Mary Tudor. John entered Hart Hall, Oxford, later Magdalen Hall, in 1584, he also studied at Cambridge, and entered Lincoln\'s Inn in 1592. A portrait of him in 1591 shows a young man holding the hilt of a very large rapier, and wearing a large earring shaped as a cross. He has a look of audacity, perhaps of sensuality, with a tinge of melancholy. He seems at this time to have studied the controversy between Catholics and Protestants, and in his "Epistle" (rhymed heroic couplets) we perceive that he was of no fervent piety, but rather a doubter. His satires appear to have been written about 1593. They are obscure, and the versification is bad, apparently of set purpose. Often the reader is puzzled to guess how a line is meant to be scanned, the natural rules of accent are set at defiance, as Ben Jonson remarked. Probably Donne aimed at imitating Persius, the obscure young Roman satirist. The satires can scarcely be read except by curious students tracing the evolution of Donne\'s thought and style.

In 1596 he sailed with Essex to the victory over Spain at Cadiz. Before starting he wrote one of his poetical "Elegies" to a lady with whom he had an intrigue. In 1597 he went on "the Islands Voyage" with Essex, to capture plate ships. He experienced a tempest, was driven back to Falmouth, wrote "The Storm," and later, in the Tropics "The Calm". The men are roasted by the sun and bathe, then

from the sea into the ship we turn,
Like parboiled wretches, on the coals to burn.

The poems are rude in versification and exaggeration, but most vivid are their pictures of Nature and the sea. Returning in the autumn of 1597, Donne is supposed to have travelled in Italy and Spain, if it be not more probable that he visited these countries in[Pg 285] 1592-1596. If Ben Jonson rightly said that Donne wrote "all his best pieces of verse" before he was 25, they must have been finished by 1598. They were not printed till 1633, but circulated in manuscript.

Probably most of the pieces in his "Elegies" and "Songs and Sonnets" were composed in his tempestuous youth. The amorous conceits in "The Flea" are equally rich in ingenious fancies and in bad taste. "Woman\'s Constancy" and many other poems have the same moral burden as

\'T was last night I swore to thee
That fond impossibility,—

to be constant. The sun is chidden for too early rising—

Go tell Court-huntsmen that the King will ride,—

but leave lovers undisturbed. In "The Indifferent" he brags that he can love all sorts and conditions of women, like Lord Byron and other amorists. He finds in himself "something like a heart," but rather rumpled. Of a later period, when he met his future wife, may be a charming song,

Just such disparity
As is \'twixt air and angel\'s purity\'
\'Twixt women\'s love and men\'s will ever be.

But the Elegies address ladies of whose nature purity is no part, and it may be admitted that the confessions do not win admiration for Donne\'s taste and temper, not to mention his morals, when he wrote them. "The Curse" on a woman, or a man who loves his mistress, far outdoes the Epodes of Horace in cold ferocity. "The Bait" contains remarks on the cruelty of angling which must have vexed Izaak Walton to the heart. "Love\'s Deity," opening with the charmed lines

I long to talk with some old lover\'s ghost,
Who died before the God of Love was born,

thence descends into crabbed and difficult conceits. Two songs, "The Funeral" and "The Relic," are on a bracelet of his mistress\'s hair: whoever exhumes the poet\'s body will find

A bracelet of bright hair about the bone.

[Pg 286]

These verses of Donne\'s disturbed and adventurous youth, poems ingenious, conceited, passionate, mystical, or cynical, have not the music as of birds\' songs which rings in the lyrists of that age: nor have the Epithalamia the charm of Spenser\'s. Donne in youth was not at ease with himself: he speculates too curiously. He may try to play the sensualist, but there is a dark backward in his genius; there are chords not in tune with mirth and pleasure. He is as unique as Browning, as little like other poets. If his Elegies contain, as has been supposed, the story of a love affair, it was of a nature to make him uneasy.

In 1597 Donne became secretary of the Lord Keeper, Sir Thomas Egerton, and met his niece, Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower. He married her secretly at the end of 1601, and therefore was imprisoned in the Fleet jail, in February, 1602, thanks to the lady\'s angry father, who soon after forgave the young lovers.

By 1601 he had begun "The Progress of the Soul," or "Metempsychosis," the adventures of a soul "placed in most shapes,"[1] for example, in that fabulous and mortuary weed, a mandrake, in the roe of a fish, in a sparrow, and so forth, all to little purpose. He was unemployed, eager for employment, given to writing long letters, and laments for deaths in verse, and he assisted in a controversy with the Catholics.

Now come such more or less theological works as "Pseudo-Martyr," "Ignatius His Conclave," and "Biathanatos": the first (1610) is addressed to the King, who finally induced Donne to take holy orders. "Divine" poems he also wrote, but he was not anxious to be a professional divine. Donne\'s conceits were daring to the border of profanity. A visit to Paris with his patron, Sir Robert Drury, while Mrs. Donne was about to become a mother, was marked by a telepathic experience—Donne saw his wife, then in England, with a dead baby in her arms. Walton says that the day of the vision was that of the child\'s birth and death, but the dates do not bear out the statement. Walton\'s remark that Drury sent an express messenger to England, to inquire about Mrs. Donne, is certainly untrue.

[Pg 287]

In honour of a daughter of Drury who died young, Donne had written two extraordinary poems: "The First Anniversary" of the decease was published in 1611, "The Second Anniversary" was written in 1612. There seemed reason to fear that Donne would celebrate Miss Drury, whom he had never seen, once a year, while his life endured. The poem as a whole is "An Anatomy, of the World, wherein, by occasion of the death of Mistress Elizabeth Drury, the frailty and decay of this whole world is represented". Donne indulges in an exaggeration of hyperbole equalled only by the ancient Irish bards who sang the feats of Cuchulainn. For example, when Elizabeth joined the Saints

This world in that great earthquake languished,
For in a common bath of tears it bled,

an allusion to Seneca bleeding to death in a bath full of hot water. This manner of hyperbole flourished after Donne\'s time, infecting Crashaw and others,

For there\'s a kind of world remaining still,

as Donne admits. Poetry on the deplorable brevity of life and the instability of things may be excellent, and that instability is the theme of Donne, but Mistress Drury is harped upon too much, and Donne was taking this paragon on trust:—

she whose rich eyes and breast
Gilt the West Indies and perfumed the East.

It is impossible to understand how a poet, now of the mature age of thirty-nine, could write in this fashion if he had any humour.

"The Second Anniversary" dwelt on the incommodities of the soul in this life, and her exaltation in the next. Donne says that the world still has a semblance of life, as when the eyes and tongue of a decapitated man twinkle and roll, while

He grasps his hands and he pulls up his feet.
So struggles this dead world,

without Elizabeth, whom Donne never saw! There are good lines such as

Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks,

[Pg 288]

and the satiric remarks on

A spongy slack divine,

who

Drinks and sucks in th\' instructions of great men.

In return for these poems Drury housed and took care of Donne and his large family. The poet now became the adviser of the Earl of Somerset in the hideous suit of nullity, and, when things went against Somerset, who had done nothing for him, Donne proposed to publish his poems in "a few copies". "I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution," and indeed, as Donne at this moment intended to take holy orders, which he did in January, 1615, he was wise in breaking his resolution. He now obtained some clerical appointments, but in August, 1617, lost his wife. There is little doubt that his grief changed him from a worldly man into a man of heartfelt piety, the man whom Izaak Walton knew and adored.

His "Holy Sonnets," written at this time, have some noble almost Miltonic passages, mingled with lines that cannot be made to scan, and with hyperbolical conceits. Thus, though

Thou my thirst hast fed,
A holy thirsty dropsy melts me yet.

He requests the American explorers to lend him "new seas," so that he may drown his world in tears of penitence. He makes "yet" rhyme to "spirit.". The excuse made for such things is that Donne thought Elizabethan poetry too dulcet.

He is a poet by flashes, which are very brilliant with strange coloured fires. He is not really so obscure as he is reckoned: he can be understood, though Ben Jonson, who "esteemed him the first poet in the world in some things," added that "Donne from not being understood would perish".

Donne died on March 31, 1631. His poetry, styled by Dr. Johnson "metaphysical," exercised an influence not wholly favourable on his successors; happily it did not affect Lovelace and Herrick.

[Pg 289]

Minor Lyrists.

In the Elizabethan age it might almost be said that every man was his own poet. The name of poet became a term of contempt, as we learn from Ben Jonson and other sources. Of the best lyrists we have spoken in treating of the dramatists, of Sidney, Raleigh, and the chief sonneteers. Another sonneteer is Thomas Watson, an Oxford man, and allied to Spenser\'s circle (15571592). His "Hecatompathia" (1582) and "Tears of Fancy" (posthumously published) are sonnets, either informal or formal in structure; the "Hecatompathia" mainly consists of translations from modern languages. Watson had learning and some skill, but not much natural music in his soul.

Henry Constable, a Yorkshire man and a Catholic, may have been born about 1562 or earlier, judging by his degree taken at Cambridge in 1580. He passed much of his life abroad, and, on his return, part of it an the Tower, in the last years of Elizabeth. His sonnets ("Diana," 1592-1594) are pleasing, more tunable than many sonnets of his own and the succeeding age. Others have been exhumed from manuscript; some are devotional.

Willoughby\'s "Avisa" (the sonnet sequences usually bore girls\' names) would be forgotten but for the magic initials "W. S." and allusions to W.\'s love affairs. He may have been William Shakespeare; or he may have been Walter Smith, or William Smith, author of another such book as "Avisa," "Chloris" (1596). With him may pair off Lynch, with "Diella," and Griffin with "Fidessa," love-sonneteers.

Richard Barnfield (1574-1627), an Oxford man, was fertile in 1594-1598, publishing "The Affectionate Shepherd" (1594), "Cynthia" (1595), "The Encomion of Lady Pecunia" (1598). The Shepherd is much too affectionate for Christian and Northern tastes, in the style of Virgil\'s second Eclogue,

that horrid one
Beginning with formosum pastor Corydon,

as Byron describes it. In "Cynthia" he enthusiastically admires Spenser. If he wrote the sonnet "If Music and sweet Poetry agree," which appears in poems published with "Lady Pecunia,"[Pg 290] and the charming "As it fell upon a day" (often ascribed to Shakespeare), in the miscellany "England\'s Helicon," Barnfield was among the true lyrists of his time. "Lady Pecunia" is a satire on what wealth can do, and "The Complaint of Poetry for the death of Liberality," a satire on what it does not usually care to do. He made experiments in English hexameters: after the age of 24 he ceased to write or ceased to publish.

Thomas Campion (died in 1620) was, fortunately, a more persevering poet. Though his name was hardly known to modern readers till of recent years, because his lyrics were mainly published with music of his own composition, he was one of the most exquisite and delightful singers in the whole of English literature. Born in London, he went in 1581 to Peterhouse, Cambridge, left in 1585, and entered Gray\'s Inn in 1586. Five of his poems appear in a Miscellany of 1591: his Latin poems are of 1595. In 1601 appeared his first "Booke of Ayres," the music by himself and his friend Philip Rosseter. In 1602 he put forth "Observations on the Art of English Poesie," written, strange as it appears, in favour of verses in quantitative metres, without rhyme. He had taken the degree of Doctor of Medicine: he also wrote (1613) three Masques, one was for the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth, "the Queen of Hearts," another was for the shameful nuptials of the Earl of Somerset and Frances Howard, stained as they were with vice, vulgarity, and murder. Campion\'s later "Bookes of Ayres" are of 1612 and 1617. He died in March, 1619-1620.

Some of Campion\'s lyrics may have been suggested by and adapted to his own music, in other cases he composed the music for his own words. He employs a great number of metres, all tunable: with him music and sweet poesy agree. To think of these songs, as Thackeray said of some of Scott\'s novels, is to wish to run to the bookshelves, take them down and read them. Nothing can be more charming than the verses on "The Fairy Queen, Proserpina," and "Give Beauty all her right,"

Silly boy,\'tis full moon yet,
Thy night as day shines clearly,

Now let her change I and spare not!
[Pg 291]Since she proves strange, I care not!

Kind are her answers,
But her performance keeps no day,
Breaks time, as dancers
From their own music when they stray.

Drayton.

Michael Drayton (born at Hartshill in Warwickshire, 1563, died 1631) is a poet of nearly the same character and calibre as Daniel (of whom later), with the same beginnings as a sonneteer, the same prolixity in versifying history, and the same steady laborious cast of mind. From the age of 10, as he tells us, he was bent on being a Poet, and like greater poets, Burns, for example, he was usually inspired by some model, which, unlike Burns, he did not transfigure and excel. His earliest work, "The Harmony of the Church" (1591), contains rhymed paraphrases of Biblical songs and prayers. Drayton, like Milton, addresses the Heavenly Muse, singing "not of toys on Mount Ida, but of triumphs on Mount Sion". Thus from Exodus XV., the triumph over Egypt,

The Lord Jehovah is a Man of War,
Pharaoh, his chariots, and his mighty host,
Were by his hand in the wild waters lost,
His captains drownèd in Red Sea so far.

In 1593 appears his "Shepherd\'s Garland". Spenser had made shepherds fashionable; and eclogues were the mode. In one, "Beta," Queen Elizabeth was praised; in another, Sir Philip Sidney was lamented. The work, with improvements, was republished in 1606. The ballad of Dowsabel was a pleasant and fortunate addition. Anne Goodere, later Lady Rainsford, a daughter of Drayton\'s patron, Sir Henry Goodere, is the person named Idea, in the sonnets collected under that title. If the one famous and immortal sonnet,

Since there\'s no help, come, let us kiss and part,

be really by Drayton, he here showed mastery; and the addresses to Idea may not be mainly fanciful. Another sonnet on rivers, Drayton\'s favourite theme in the "Polyolbion," identifies Idea\'s[Pg 292] home—so far she was certainly a real person. But there are critics who deny to him,

Since there\'s no help, come, let us kiss and part.

It has even been attributed to Shakespeare, because of its excellence.

Following Daniel\'s "Complaint of Rosamond," Drayton versified the stories of Piers Gaveston, Matilda, daughter of Lord Robert Fitzwater, Robert Duke of Normandy, and "The Great Cromwell" (Thomas). Like Daniel, he gave little sack to a monstrous deal of bread, in a close following of prose chronicles. "Mortimeriados" (1596) is another legend, in rhyme royal, of the wars of the barons against the second and third Edwards, later recast as "The Barons\' Wars," in an eight-lined stanza. "The English Heroical Epistles" were a following of the Letters of Ovid\'s heroines; there are twelve lovers and ladies, each writes a letter and receives a reply. Rosamond, Jane Shore, and Geraldine are, naturally, among the ladies. Drayton employs the rhymed decasyllabic couplet, and adds learned notes, comparing, for example, the Maze of Rosamond to the Cnossian Labyrinth of the Minotaur in Crete. The verses are curiously modern in some places.

The poet now did work for Henslowe and the stage. Like Daniel he wrote a panegyric of the new King, James VI and I, in 1603: it brought him no advancement, and in the next year he made "The Owle" the mouthpiece of a satire, opening with the outworn dream-formula which had so long haunted verse.

In 1606 he attempted odes: the best ............