A History of English Poetry: an Unpublished Continuation

INTRODUCTION

Among the unpublished papers of Thomas and Joseph Warton at Winchester College the most interesting and important item is undoubtedly a continuation of Thomas Warton's History of English Poetry. This continuation completes briefly the analysis of Elizabethan satire and discusses the Elizabethan sonnet. The discussion offers material of interest particularly for the bibliographer and the literary historian. The bibliographer, for example, will be intrigued by a statement of Thomas Warton that he had examined a copy of the Sonnets published in 1599—a decade before the accepted date of the first edition. The literary historian will be interested in, inter alia, unpublished information concerning the university career of Samuel Daniel and in the theory that Shakespeare's sonnets should be interpreted as if addressed by a woman to her lover.

Critically appraised, Warton's treatment of the Elizabethan sonnet seems skimpy. To dismiss the sonnet in one third the amount of space devoted to Joseph Hall's Virgidemiarum seems to betray a want of proportion. Perhaps even more damaging may seem the fact that Warton failed to mention more sonnet collections than he discussed. About twenty years later, in 1802, Joseph Ritson listed in his Bibliographia Poetica the sonnet collections of Barnaby Barnes, Thomas Lodge, William Percy, and John Soowthern—all evidently unknown to Warton. But Warton was not particularly slipshod in his researches. In his immediately preceding section, on Elizabethan satire, he had stopped at 1600; and in the continuation he deliberately omitted the sonnet collections published after that date. Thus, though he had earlier in the History (III, 264, n.) promised a discussion of Drayton, he omitted him here because his sonnets were continually being augmented until 1619. Two sixteenth century collections which Warton had mentioned earlier in the History (III, 402, n.) he failed to discuss here, William Smith's Chloris (1596) and Henry Lock's Sundry Christian Passions, contayned in two hundred Sonnets (1593). Concerning Lock he had quoted significantly (IV, 8-9) from The Return from Parnassus: "'Locke and Hudson, sleep you quiet shavers among the shavings of the press, and let your books lie in some old nook amongst old boots and shoes, so you may avoid my censure.'" A collection which certainly did not need to avoid censure was Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella; and for Warton's total neglect of Sidney's sonnets it seems difficult to account, for in this section on the sonnet Sidney as a poet would have been most aptly discussed. The Astrophel and Stella was easily available in eighteenth-century editions of Sidney's works, and Warton admired the author. Both Thomas and Joseph Warton, however, venerated Sidney mainly for his Arcadia and his Apology for Poetry. For Joseph Warton, Sidney was the prime English exhibit of great writers who have not, he thought, "been able to express themselves with beauty and propriety in the fetters of verse."1 And Thomas Warton quoted evidently only once from Sidney's verse,2 and then only by way of England's Helicon.3 The omission of Sidney, then, is the glaring defect; of the dozen or so other Elizabethan sonnet collections which escaped Warton, most were absolutely or practically unknown, and none seem to have been available to him in the Bodleian or the British Museum.

At the time of his death, on 21 May 1790, there were in print only eleven sheets,4 or eighty-eight pages, of the fourth and final volume, which was scheduled to bring the history of English poetry down to the close of the seventeenth century. For four years after the publication of the third volume in 1781 Warton repeatedly promised to complete the work,5 and a notice at the end of his edition of Milton's Minor Poems advertised in 1785 the "speedy publication" of the fourth volume. But to his printer Warton evidently sent nothing beyond Section XLVIII. The present continuation was probably written during or shortly after 1782: it contains no reference to any publication after William Hayley's Essay on Epic Poetry, which appeared in 1782; and according to Thomas Caldecott, Warton for the last seven years of his life discontinued work upon the History.6

The notes which Thomas Warton had made for the completion of the History were upon his death commandeered by his brother, Joseph, at that time headmaster of Winchester College. Joseph Warton made some halfhearted efforts to get on with the volume,7 but neither Winchester nor Wickham, whither he retired in 1793, was a proper place in which to carry on the necessary research. Moreover he was much more interested in editing Pope and Dryden; and securing advantageous contracts to edit these poets whom he knew well, he let the History slide.

Joseph Warton appears, however, to have touched up the present continuation, for a few expansions seem to be in his script rather than in his brother's. It is difficult to be positive in the discrimination of hands here, as Thomas Warton's hand in this manuscript is quite irregular. Pens of varying thicknesses were used; black ink was used for the text and red ink for footnotes, and one note (16) was pencilled. Moreover, certain passages appear to have been written during periods of marked infirmity or haste and are legible only with difficulty if at all. In any case, those additions which were presumably made by Joseph Warton merely expand the original version; they do not alter or modify any of Thomas Warton's statements.

In the text of the present edition the expansions which appear to be in Joseph Warton's hand are placed within parentheses, which were not used for punctuation in the text of the manuscript itself. Because of the difficulties of reproduction, all small capitals have been translated into lover case italics.

This continuation, discovered by the editor among the Warton papers in the Moberly Library at Winchester College, is here published with the kind permission of the Right Honorable Harold T. Baker and Sir George Henry Gates, retired and present Wardens of Winchester College, and of the Fellows of the College. The editor is indebted also to the Reverend Mr. J. d'E. Firth, Assistant Master and Chaplain; and Mr. C. E. R. Claribut and Mr. J. M. G. Blakiston, past and present Assistant Fellows' Librarians. The Richmond Area University Center contributed a generous grant-in-aid.

A HISTORY OF ENGLISH POETRY: AN UNPUBLISHED CONTINUATION

(In enumerating so many of these petty Epigrammatists, I may have been perhaps too prolix,—but I did it to shew the taste & turn of writing at this time; & now proceed to observe, that, in the year, 1614,)8 the vogue which satire had acquired from Hall and Marston, probably encouraged Barten Holiday of Christ-Church in Oxford, to translate Persius, when he was scarcely twenty years of age. The first edition is dated 1616. This version had four editions from its publication to the year 1673 inclusive, notwithstanding the versification is uncommonly scabrous. The success of his Persius induced Holiday to translate Juvenal, a clearer & more translatable satirist. But both versions, as Dryden has justly observed,9 were written for scholars, and not for the world: and by treading on the heels of his originals, he seems to have hurt them by too near an approach. He seized the meaning but not the spirit of his authors. Holiday, however, who was afterwards graduated in divinity and promoted to an archdeaconry, wrote a comedy called the Marriage of the Arts, acted before the court at Woodstock-palace, which was even too grave and scholastic for king James the first.

I close my prolix review of these pieces by remarking, that as our old plays have been assembled and exhibited to the public in one uniform view,10 so a collection of our old satires and epigrams would be a curious and useful publication. Even the dull and inelegant productions, of a remote period which have real Life for their theme, become valuable and important by preserving authentic pictures of antient popular manners: by delineating the gradations of vice and folly, they furnish new speculation to the moral historian, and at least contribute to the illustration of writers of greater consequence.

The Sonnet, together with the Ottava Rima, seems to have been the invention of the Provincial bards, but to have been reduced to its present rhythmical prosody by some of the earliest Italian poets. It is a short monody, or Ode of one stanza containing fourteen lines, with uncommonly frequent returns of rhymes more or less combined. But the disposition of the rhymes has been sometimes varied according to the caprice or the convenience of the writer. There is a sonnet of the regular construction in the Provincial dialect, written by Guglielmo de gli Amalricchi, on Robert king of Naples who died in 1321.11 But the Italian language affords earlier examples. (The multitude of identical cadences renders it a more easy and proper metre to use in Italian than in English verse.)

No species of verse appears to have been more eagerly and universally cultivated by the Italian poets, from the fourteenth century to the present times. Even the gravest of their epic and tragic writers have occasionally sported In these lighter bays. (A long list of them is given in the beginning of the fourth Volume of Quadrios History of Italian Poetry.) But perhaps the most elegant Italian sonnets are yet to be found in Dante. Petrarch's sonnets are too learned (metaphysical) and refined. Of Dante's compositions in this style I cannot give a better idea, than in (the ingenious) Mr. Hayley's happy translation of Dante's beautiful sonnet to his friend Guido Calvacanti [sic], written in his youth, and probably before the year 1300.

We have before seen, that the Sonnet was imported from Italy into English poetry, by lord Surrey and Wyat, about the middle of the sixteenth century. But it does not seem to have flourished in its legitimate form, till towards the close of the reign of queen Elisabeth. What I call the legitimate form, in which it now appeared, was not always free from licentious innovations in the rythmical arrangement.

To omit Googe, Tuberville [sic], Gascoigne, and some other petty writers who have interspersed their miscellanies with a few sonnets, and who will be considered under another class, our first professed author in this mode of composition, after Surrey and Wyat, is Samuel Daniel. His Sonnets called Delia, together with his Complaint of Rosamond, were printed for Simon Waterson, in 1591.13 It was hence that the name of Delia, suggested to Daniel by Tibullus, has been perpetuated in the song of the lover as the name of a mistress. These pieces are dedicated to Sir Philip Sydney's sister, the general patroness, Mary countess of Pembroke. But Daniel had been her preceptor.14 It is not said in Daniel's Life, that he travelled. His forty-eighth sonnet is said to have been "made at the authors being in Italie."15 Delia does not appear to have been transcendently cruel, nor were his sufferings attended with any very violent paroxysms of despair. His style and his expressions have a coldness proportioned to his passion. Yet as he does not weep seas of tears, nor utter sighs of fire, he has the merit of avoiding the affected allusions and hyperbolical exaggerations of his brethren. I cannot in the mean time, with all these concessions in his favour, give him the praise of elegant sentiment, true tenderness, and natural pathos. He has, however, a vigour of diction, and a volubility of verse, which cover many defects, and are not often equalled by his contemporaries. I suspect his sonnets were popular. They are commended, by the author of the Return from Parnassus, in a high strain of panegyric.

But I do not think they are either very sweet, or much tinctured with the Italian manner. The following is one of the best; which I the rather chuse to recite, as it exemplifies his mode of compliment, and contains the writer's opinion of Spenser's use of obsolete words.

But, to say nothing more, whatever wisdom there may be in allowing that love was the errour of his youth, there was no great gallantry in telling this melancholy truth to the lady.

Daniel is a multifarious writer, and will be mentioned again. I shall add nothing more of him here than the following anecdote. When he was a young student at Magdalen-Hall in Oxford, about the year 1580, notwithstanding the disproportion of his years, and his professed aversion to the severer acadamical [sic] studies, the Dean and Canons of Christchurch, by a public capitular act now remaining, gave Daniel a general invitation to their table at dinner, merely on account of the liveliness of his conversation.18

About the same time, Thomas Watson published his Hecatompathia, Or the passionate century of love, a hundred sonnets.19 I have not been able to discover the date of this publication:20 but his First set of Italian Madrigals appeared at London, in 1590.21 I have called them sonnets: but they often wander beyond the limits, nor do they always preserve the conformation [or] constraint,22 of the just Italian Sonetto.23 Watson is more brilliant than Daniel: but he is encumbered with conceit and the trappings of affectation. In the love-songs of this age, a lady with all her load of panegyric, resembles one of the unnatural factitious figures which we sometimes see among the female portraits at full length of the same age, consisting only of pearls, gems, necklaces, earings, embroidery, point-lace, farthingale, fur, and feathers. The blooming nymph is lost in her decorations. Watson, however, has sometimes uncommon vigour and elegance. As in the following description.

Spenser's Sonnets were printed with his Epithalamium. They are entered, in the year 1593, under this title to William Ponsonby, "Amoretti, and Epithalamium, written not long since by Edmond Spencer."25 In a recommendatory sonnet prefixed, by G. W. senior, it appears that Spenser was now in Ireland. Considered under the idea which their title suggests, undoubtedly these pieces are too classical, abstracted, and even philosophical. But they have many strokes of imagination and invention, a strength of expression, and a stream of versification, not unworthy of the genius of the author of the Faerie Queene.26 On the whole however, with the same metaphysical flame which Petrarch felt for the accomplished Laura, with more panegyric than passion, Spenser in his sonnets seldom appeals to the heart, and too frequently shews more of the poet and the scholar than of the lover. The following, may be selected in illustration of this opinion.

But the following is in a more intelligible and easy strain, and has lent some of its graces to the storehouse of modern compliment. The thought on which the whole turns is, I believe, original, for I do not recollect it in the Italian poets.

The last couplet is platonic, but deduced with great address and elegance from the leading idea, which Gay has apparently borrowed in his beautiful ballad of Black-eyed Susan.

Among the sonnet-writers of this period, next to Spenser I place Shakespeare. Perhaps in brilliancy of imagery, quickness of thought, variety and fertility of allusion, and particularly in touches of pastoral painting, Shakespeare is superiour. But he is more incorrect, indigested, and redundant: and if Spenser has too much learning, Shakespeare has too much conceit. It may be necessary however to read the first one hundred & twenty six sonnets of our divine dramatist as written by a lady:29 for they are addressed with great fervency yet delicacy of passion, and with more of fondness than friendship, to a beautiful youth.30 Only twenty six, the last bearing but a small proportion to the whole number, and too manifestly of a subordinate cast, have a female for their object. But under the palliative I have suggested, many descriptions or illustrations of juvenile beauty, pathetic endearments, and sentimental declarations of hope or disappointment, which occur in the former part of this collection, will lose their impropriety and give pleasure without disgust. The following, a few lines omitted, is unperplexed and elegant.

In the next, he pursues the same argument in the same strain.

Here are strong marks of Shakespeare's hand and manner. In the next, he continues his play with the flowers. He chides the forward violet, a sweet thief, for stealing the fragrance of the boy's breath, and for having died his veins with too rich a purple. The lilly is condemned for presuming to emulate the whiteness of his hand, and buds of marjoram for stealing the ringlets of his hair. Our lover is then seduced into some violent fictions of the same kind; and after much ingenious absurdity concludes more rationally,

Shakespeare's Sonnets were published in the year 1599.36 I remember to have seen this edition, I think with Venus and Adonis and the rape of Lucrece, a very small book, in the possession of the late Mr Thomson of Queen's College Oxford, a very curious and intelligent collector of this kind of literature.37 But they were circulated in manuscript before the year 1598. For in that year, they are mentioned by Meres. "Witness his [Shakespeare's] Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugred Sonnets among his priuate friends, &c."38 They were reprinted in the year 1609; one hundred & fifty four in number. They were first printed under Shakespeares name, among his Poems, in the year 1717, by Sewel, who had no other authority than tradition.39 But that they were undoubtedly written by Shakespeare, the frequent intermixture of thoughts and expressions which now appear in his plays, and, what is more, the general complexion of their phraseology & sentiment, abundantly demonstrate, Shakespeare cannot be concealed. Their late ingenious editor is of opinion, that Daniel was Shakespeare's model.40

I have before incidentally mentioned Barnefield's Sonnets,41 which, like Shakespeare's, are adressed [sic] to a boy. They are flowery and easy. Meres recites Barnefelde among the pastoral writers.42 These sonnets, twenty in number, are written in the character of a shepherd: and there are other pieces by Barnefield which have a pastoral turn, in Englands Helicon. Sir Philip Sydney had made every thing Arcadian. I will cite four of this authors best lines, and such as will be least offensive.

Afterwards, falling in love with a lady, he closes these sonnets with a palinode.44

I have before found occasion to cite the Sonnets of H. C. called Diana printed in 1592.45 As also Dieella [sic], or Sonnets by R. L. printed in 1596.46 With these may be mentioned a set of Sonnets, entitled Fidessa more chaste than kinde. By B. Griffin, Gent. At London. Printed by the Widow Orwin for Matthew Lownes, 1596.47 They are dedicated to Mr William Essex of Lambourne in Berkshire. Then follows a deprecatory address to the gentlemen of the Inns of Court, who are earnestly requested to protect at least to approve this first attempt of a stranger; and who promises, if now successful, to publish a pastoral the next time. It is possible that some other writers of this class may have escaped my searches. I do not wish to disturb their repose, which is likely to be lasting.

NOTES TO THE TEXT

Warton's notes, which in the manuscript are designated by letters or symbols, have been numbered. Brackets enclose all the editor's corrections, expansions, and comments. The parentheses are Warton's.