a tendency on the part of the minor poets to a reiteration of thought and figure, and to a highly conventionalized diction. This literature has been called a literature of great impact; and it must be confessed that again and again we find a splendid opening or a perfect initial stanza spoiled by flagging effort, overdone or negligently slighted to an inadequate conclusion. But this was to be anticipated in the poetry of a vigorous and imaginative adolescence; and, when all is said, it is amazing to what an extent the lyrical poetry of this age remains vital and fraught with a poetic message as sure, as precious, and as fruitful as when it sprang from the hearts and brains of its ardent and buoyant creators.

CHAPTER IV

THE LYRIC IN THE REIGNS OF THE FIRST TWO STUART

MONARCHS

HE conditions that made the lyric of the latter

years

of Elizabeth what it was continued into the reign of King James, although the pasto

ral lyric, save for some reminiscences of poets

such as Drayton and Browne of Tavistock, was now definitely a thing of the past, and no sequence of sonnets of any importance (if we except those of two belated Scotchmen, Drummond and Stirling) dates later in composition than 1600. The song-books, however, continued in ever increasing popularity, and among the musicians who were also their own poets in these dainty products of the wedded arts, Thomas Campion appeared, the most successful writer of songs of his age. Campion, like his tutelary god Apollo, combined with his lyrical art and music, repute as a physician as well. He had written a successful work on counterpoint and had fired a last gun in favor of classical versification applied to English poetry. With the inconsistency of a true artist he now demonstrated his ability to write charmingly in the usually accepted English lyrical measures, exhibiting a lightness of touch and a metrical competency that place him first among the lyrists of his particular class. Campion seems more the

disciple of Catullus and Anacreon and less an imitator of Petrarch and the French and Italian Petrarchists than most of his brethren. He is neither deep nor troubled with questionings even in his sweet and grave poems that treat of religious themes. While not a mere hedonist, from being which, with its often attendant grossness, / Campion's delicate taste preserves him, his sentiments are always those of a lover and worshipper of beauty, however he may breathe in with his enjoyment thereof the sense of its fragility and vanity. In Campion, as was to be expected, the words are always put together with a sense of their value in song; and his Airs, of which he produced no less than four books up to 1619, display an equal recognition of the art of song in its verbal applications. As we turn over the song-books of Campion's many imitators and rivals, we meet with the names of Dowland, Weelkes, Hume, Bateson, Robert Jones, and many more. John Dowland was a lutenist, famous at home and abroad, an artist who betrayed those mixed traits of the artistic temperament which are so trying at times to the less gifted. Of Hume all we know is that he is described as a captain; of Jones only that several of the lyrics of his songbooks are of unusual loveliness. To what extent these cultivated musicians were their own poets, as certainly was true of Campion, we are not definitely informed. Among the poets of the early days of James who achieved for themselves success was William Drummond, the Scottish friend of Jonson, whose lyrical verse was collected and published in 1616, the year of the death of Shake

speare. Drummond is a belated Petrarchist and follower of Sidney and the sonneteers. He exhibits a certain ingenuity and poetical aptness of his own alike in subject and figure, but maintains the old-fashioned Italian forms of verse, being indeed the last writer of note to employ the madrigal. Drummond is often happily effective, if never really great. A lesser poet and even more purely imitative was Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, later Earl of Stirling, another Scotchman to follow in the wake of English lyrical fashion. His Aurora, a series of sonnets interspersed with songs and elegies, of uncertain date of writing, was first published in 1604. Stirling came too late and wrote too much. Many things are good in him; more, perhaps, than the casual reader might be likely to discover. Of Sir Robert Ayton, a third Scottish poet, secretary to the queen of King James, Anne of Denmark, one lyric ("I do confess thou 'rt smooth and fair") is generally known. Ayton has further been reputed (among several) the author of the original of “Auld Lang Syne."

However the rediscovery of ancient literature and art may have kindled the imagination of the Renaissance, the practice of Renaissance poets had, least of all things in it, the qualities of repose, design, and finish. Feeling and passion, the beauty of the world, and the glory and radiance of that physical beauty, these were their themes, and their spirit rode lightly the crest of the wave of the present, looking neither before nor after. Even where there is a large show of design, as in The Faëry Queen, and as serious and godly an intention as ever quickened the

dreams of a poet, we feel that much of this is futile and that the real preoccupation of this exquisite artificer in words is in the delicate and beautiful details of the moment in which his wider purposes are only too often obscured if not totally lost. In short, the Spenserian cult of beauty, which well typifies the lesser ideals of the minor poets who were Spenser's contemporaries, is illustrated in this attitude of the devotee at beauty's altar rather than by that of the student of beauty's laws. Elaborate, pictorial is this art, subdued to the melody of words and to the delights of the senses; diffuse, ornate, and enamored of the iridescence of change and of the grace of stately motion; but careless whither it go or if the resulting narrative, description, or emotion in any wise justify its devious wanderings. This is why the Spenserians and their kind among the lyrists often know not when to hold the hand, entranced with their gentle task; why their figures of speech are lines too prolonged, their poems, stanzas in overplus, and their whole art weighted at times with the gauds and jewels of elaborate artistry to the disorder of the pattern or design. It was Donne's consciousness of all this that caused him (as we have seen), in the nineties, to discard the hallowed mannerisms of pastoralists and sonneteers. And in discarding these superficialities of style, he discarded their superficialities of thought, substituting the actual experiences and emotions of his strange personality, clothed in the stranger garb of illustration drawn from contemporary abstractions of scientific and philosophic thought. Ben Jonson, in his lyrical