Edmund Gosse

“ The Wife is smooth and elegant, but uninspired. There is no question that the horrible death of the writer, and the extraordinary way in which his murderers were brought to justice, gave an extraneous charm to his writings. Nor can we be quite sure that Overbury was in fact such a “ glorious constellation ” of all the religious virtues as the 17th century believed. He certainly kept very bad company, and positive evidence of his goodness is wanting. But no one was ever more transcendently canonized by becoming the victim of conspirators whose crimes were equally detestable and unpopular. ”

“ With the reign of Elizabeth a certain tendency to pastoral was introduced in England. In Gascoigne and in Whetstone traces have been observed of a tendency towards the form and spirit of eclogue. It has been conjectured that this tendency, combined with the study of the few extant eclogues of Clémont Marot, led Spenser to the composition of what is the finest example of pastoral in the English language, the Shepherd’s Calendar, printed in 1579. ”

“ Rhyme exists to satisfy the ear by the richness of repeated sound. In the beginnings of modern verse, alliteration, a repetition of a consonant, satisfied the listener. A further ornament was discovered when assonance, a repetition of the vowel-sounds, was invented. Finally, both of these were combined to procure a full identity of sound in the entire syllable, and rhyme took its place in prosody. When this identity of sound occurs in the last syllable of a verse it is the typical end rhyme of modern European poetry. ”

“ Having led up to this work, the influence of which was to be confined to England, we return to Sannazaro’s Arcadia, which left its mark upon every literature in Europe. This remarkable romance, which was the type and the original of so many succeeding pastorals, is written in rich but not laborious periods of musical prose, into which are inserted at frequent intervals passages of verse, contests between shepherds on the “humile fistula di Coridone,” or laments for the death of some beautiful virgin. The characters move in a world of supernatural and brilliant beings ”

“ These local imitations of the suave Italian pastoral were followed by still more crude romances, the Rotterdamsche Arcadia of Willem den Elger, the Walchersche Arcadia of Gargon, and the Noordwijker Arcadia of Jacobus van der Valk. Germany has nothing to offer us of this class, for the Diana of Werder (1644) and Die adriatische Rosamund of Zesen (1645) are scarcely pastorals even in form.
In England the writing of eclogues of the sub-Spenserian class of Breton and Wither led in another generation to a rich growth of lyrics which may be roughly called pastoral, but are not strictly bucolic. ”

“ So far from attempting to sink to colloquial idiom, and adopt a realism in rustic dialect, the tenor of Sidney’s narrative is even more grave and stately than it is conceivable that the conversation of the most serious nobles can have ever been. ”

“ It will be noticed, of course, that all these recent productions have so much in common with the literature which is produced around them that they almost evade separate classification. It is conceivable that some poet, in following the antiquarian tendency of the age, may enshrine his fancy once more in the five acts of a pure pastoral drama of the school of Tasso and Fletcher, but any great vitality in pastoral is hardly to be looked for in the future. ”

“ In 1589 Lodge appended some eclogues to his Scilla’s Metamorphosis, but in his Rosalynde (1590) he made a much more important contribution to English literature in general, and to Arcadian poetry in particular. This beautiful and fantastic book is modelled more exactly upon the masterpiece of Sannazaro than any other in our language. The Sixe Idillia of 1588, paraphrases of Theocritus, are anonymous, but conjecture has attributed them to Sir Edward Dyer. In 1598 Bartholomew Young published an English version of the Diana of Montemayor. ”

“ Conscious rhyme belongs to the early medieval periods of monkish literature, and the name given to lines with an intentional rhyme in the middle is Leonine verse, the invention being attributed to a probably apocryphal monk Leoninus or Leonius, who is supposed to be the author of a history of the Old Testament preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. ”

“ About the year 1601, being in Edinburgh on a holiday, he met Robert Carr, then an obscure page to the earl of Dunbar; and so great a friendship was struck up between the two youths that they came up to London together. ”

“ In French, two species of rhyme are accepted, the feminine and the masculine. Feminine rhymes are those which end in a mute e, masculine those which do not so end. The Alexandrine, which is the classical metre in French, is built up on what are known as rimes croisées, that is to say a couplet of masculine rhymes followed by a couplet of feminine, and that again by masculine. ”

“ It was in Spain that the influence of the Arcadia made itself most rapidly felt outside Italy. The earliest Spanish eclogues had been those of Juan de Encina, acted in 1492. Gil Vicente, who was also a Portuguese writer, had written Spanish religious pastorals early in the 16th century. But Garcilaso de la Vega is the founder of Spanish pastoral. His first eclogue. El Dulce lamentar de los pastores, is considered one of the finest poems of its kind in ancient or in modern literature. ”

“ These gnomes or maxims were extended and put into literary shape by the poets. Fragments of Solon, Euenus and Mimnermus have been preserved, in a very confused state, from having been written, for purposes of comparison, on the margins of the MSS. of Theognis, whence they have often slipped into the text of that poet. Theognis enshrines his moral precepts in his elegies, and this was probably the custom of the rest; it is improbable that there ever existed a species of poetry made up entirely of successive gnomes. ”

“ In German literature they left but little mark, but in France they were cleverly copied by Arnaud Berquin. A much more important pastoral writer is Jean Pierre Clovis de Florian, who began by imitating the Galatea of Cervantes, and continued with an original bucolic romance entitled Estelle. It has always been noticeable that pastoral is a form of literature which disappears before a breath of ridicule. ”

“ This famous work is divided into twelve eclogues, and it is remarkable because of the constancy with which Spenser turns in it from the artificial Latin style of pastoral then popular in Italy, and takes his inspiration direct from Theocritus. It is important to note that this is the first effort made in European literature to bring upon a pastoral stage the actual rustics of a modern country, using their own peasant dialect. ”

“ Sometimes it adds further information with regard to what has been left imperfectly concluded in the work itself. For instance, in the case of a play, the epilogue will occasionally tell us what became of the characters after the action closed; but this is irregular and unusual, and the epilogue is usually no more than a graceful way of dismissing the audience. ”

“ But Rochester was now infatuated, and he repeated to the countess what Overbury had said. It was at this time, too, that Overbury wrote, and circulated widely in MS., the poem called “ His Wife,” which was a picture of the virtues which a young man should demand in a woman before he has the rashness to marry her. It was represented to Lady Essex that Overbury’s object in writing this poem was to open the eyes of Rochester to her defects. The situation now resolved itself into a deadly duel for the person of Rochester between the mistress and the friend. ”

“ There the rime pleine or riche, in which not merely the sound but the emphasis is perfectly identical, is insisted upon, and a poet who rhymed as Mrs Browning did, or made “ flying ” an equivalent in sound to “ Zion,” would be deemed illiterate. ”

“ Of the gnomic movement typified by the moral works of the poets named above, Prof. Gilbert Murray has remarked that it receives its special expression in the conception of the Seven Wise Men, to whom such proverbs as “Know thyself” and “Nothing too much” were popularly attributed, and whose names differed in different lists. ”

“ He wrote little, and died early, in 1536. Two Portuguese poets followed him, and composed pastorals in Spanish, Francisco de Sá de Miranda, who imitated Theocritus, and the famous Jorge de Montemayor, whose Diana (1524) was founded on Sannazaro’s Arcadia. Caspar Gil Polo, after the death of Montemayor in 1561, completed his romance, and published in 1564 a Diana enamorada. It will be recollected that both these works are mentioned with respect, in their kind, by Cervantes. The author of Don Quixote himself published an admirable pastoral romance, Galatea, in 1584. ”

“ Waller bought a cottage at Coleshill, where he was born, meaning to die there; “a stag,” he said, “when he is hunted, and near spent, always returns home.” He actually died, however, at Hall Barn, with his children and his grandchildren about him, on the 21st of October 1687, and was buried in woollen (in spite of his expressed wish) , in the churchyard of Beaconsfield.
Waller's lyrics were at one time admired to excess, but with the exception of “Go, lovely Rose” and one or two others, they have greatly lost their charm. ”

“ Among the ancients the form was not cultivated, further than that the leader of the chorus or the last speaker advanced and said “Vos valete, et plaudite, cives”—“Good-bye, citizens, and we hope you are pleased.” ”

“ STANLEY, THOMAS (1625-1678) , English poet and philosopher, son of Sir Thomas Stanley of Cumberlow, in Herts, was born in 1625. His mother, Mary Hammond, was the cousin of Richard Lovelace, and Stanley was educated in company with the son of Edward Fairfax, the translator of Tasso. He proceeded to Cambridge in 1637, in his thirteenth year, as a gentleman commoner of Pembroke Hall. In 1641 he took his M.A. degree, but seems by that time to have proceeded to Oxford. He was wealthy, married early, and travelled much on the Continent. ”

“ It is supposed that about 1635 he met Lady Dorothy Sidney, eldest daughter of the earl of Leicester, who was then eighteen years of age. He formed a romantic passion for this girl, whom he celebrated under the name of Sacharissa. She rejected him, and married Lord Spencer in 1639. ”

“ He was the friend and companion, and at need the helper, of many poets, and was himself both a writer and a translator of verse. His Poems appeared in 1647 ; his Europa, Cupid Crucified, Venus Vigils, in 1649; his Aurora and the Prince, from the Spanish of J. Perez de Montalvan, in 1647; Oronla, the Cyprian Virgin, from the Italian of G. Preti (1650) ”