A History of Elizabethan Literature

55

I agree with Professor Hales in thinking it very improbable.

56

Something of the same love, but unluckily much less of the same gift, occurs in the poems of a friend of Browne's once hardly known except by some fair verses on Shakespere ("Renowned Spenser," etc.), but made fully accessible by Mr. R. Warwick Bond in 1893. This was William Basse, a retainer of the Wenman family near Thame, the author, probably or certainly, of a quaint defence of retainership, Sword and Buckler (1602), and of other poems —Pastoral Elegies, Urania, Polyhymnia, etc. – together with an exceedingly odd piece, The Metamorphosis of the Walnut-Tree of Boarstall, which is not quite like anything else of the time. Basse, who seems also to have spelt his name "Bas," and perhaps lived and wrote through the first forty or fifty years of the seventeenth century, is but a moderate poet. Still he is not contemptible, and deserves to rank as a member of the Spenserian family on the pastoral side; while the Walnut-Tree, though it may owe something to The Oak and the Brere, has a quaintness which is not in Spenser, and not perhaps exactly anywhere else.

57

In heraldry (but not English heraldry) = "green."

58

The most interesting collection and selection of verse of this class and time is undoubtedly Dr. Hannah's well-known and charming but rather oddly entitled Poems of Raleigh, Wotton, and other Courtly Poets in the Aldine Series. I say oddly entitled, because though Raleigh and Wotton were certainly courtiers, it would be hard to make the name good of some of the minor contributors.

59

In Minor Caroline Poets, vols. i. and ii. (Oxford, 1905-6). An important addition to the religious verse of the time was made by Mr. Dobell with the Poems (London, 1903) of Thomas Traherne, a follower of Herbert, with some strange anticipations of Blake.

60

Since this book first appeared, some persons whose judgment I respect have expressed to me surprise and regret that I have not given a higher and larger place to Henry Vaughan. A higher I cannot give, because I think him, despite the extreme beauty of his thought and (more rarely) of his expression, a most imperfect poet; nor a larger, because that would involve a critical arguing out of the matter, which would be unsuitable to the plan and scale of this book. Had he oftener written as he wrote in the famous poem referred to in the text, or as in the magnificent opening of "The World" – "I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm as it was bright,"

there would be much more to say of him. But he is not master of the expression suitable to his noble and precious thought except in the briefest bursts – bursts compared to which even Crashaw's are sustained and methodical. His admirers claim for "The Retreat" the germ of Wordsworth's great ode, but if any one will compare the two he will hardly complain that Vaughan has too little space here.

61

There was a contemporary, Henry Shirley, who was also a playwright. His only extant play, The Martyred Soldier, a piece of little merit, has been reprinted by Mr. Bullen.

62

A note may best serve for the plays of Thomas Goff (1591-1629), acted at his own college, Christ Church, but not published till after his death. The three most noteworthy, The Raging Turk, The Courageous Turk, and the Tragedy of Orestes, were republished together in 1656, and a comedy, The Careless Shepherdess, appeared in the same year. The tragedies, and especially The Raging Turk, have been a byword for extravagant frigidity, though, as they have never been printed in modern times, and as the originals are rare, they have not been widely known at first hand. A perusal justifies the worst that has been said of them: though Goff wrote early enough to escape the Caroline dry-rot in dramatic versification. His lines are stiff, but they usually scan.

63

Burton, with others of the time, constantly wrote "he" as the equivalent of the classical demonstratives. Modern, but not better, use prefers "the man," or something similar.

64

A "dizzard" = a blockhead. Said to be connected with "dizzy."

65

Fungus, mushroom.

66

Saldania is Saldanha Bay. As for Tontonteac and Dasamonquepeuc, I shall imitate the manly frankness of the boy in Henry V., and say, "I do not know what is the French for fer, and ferret, and firk."

67

Some, like my friend Mr. Lee, would demur to this, especially as regards the sonnet. But Desportes, the chief creditor alleged, was himself an infinite borrower from the Italians. Soothern, an early but worthless sonneteer, c. 1584, did certainly imitate the French.

68

In the twenty years which have passed since this book was first published, monographs on most of the points indicated on p. 459 have appeared, both in England and America.