or those which abound in the Anthology. In fact, here, as at the time alluded to, we are at the decline of paganism; energy departs, the reign of the agreeable begins. People do not relinquish the worship of beauty and pleasure, but dally with them. They deck and fit them to their taste; they cease to subdue and bend men, who sport and amuse themselves with them. It is the last beam of a setting sun; the genuine poetic sentiment dies out with Sedley, Waller, and the rhymesters of the Restoration; they write prose in verse; their heart is on a level with their style, and with an exact language we find the commencement of a new age and a new art.

Side by side with prettiness comes affectation; it is the second mark of the decadence. Instead of writing to say things, they write to say them well; they outbid their neighbours, and strain every mode of speech they push art over on the side to which it had a leaning; and as in this age it had a leaning towards vehemence and imagination,

Some ask'd how Pearls did grow, and where;

Then spake I to my girle,

To part her lips, and shew me there

The quarelets of Pearl.

One ask'd me where the roses grew ;

I bade him not go seek ;

But forthwith bade my Julia show

A bud in either cheek.'

HERRICK'S Hesperides, ed. Walford, 1859;
The Rock of Rubies, p. 32.

About the sweet bag of a bee,

Two Cupids fell at odds;
And whose the pretty prize shu'd be,
They vow'd to ask the Gods.
Which Venus hearing, thither came,
And for their boldness stript them;
And taking thence from each his flame,
With rods of mirtle whipt them.
Which done, to still their wanton cries,
When quiet grown sh'ad seen them,
She kist and wip'd their dove-like eyes,

And gave the bag between them.'

HERRICK, Ibid.; The Bag of the Bee, p. 41.

'Why so pale and wan, fond lover?

Prithee, why so pale?

Will, when looking well can't move her,

Looking ill prevail?

Prithee, why so pale?

Why so dull and mute, young sinner?

Prithee, why so mute?

Will, when speaking well can't win her,

Saying nothing do't?

Prithee, why so mute?

they pile up their emphasis and colouring. A jargon always springs out of a style. In all arts, the first masters, the inventors, discover the idea, steep themselves in it, and leave it to effect its outward form. Then come the second class, the imitators, who sedulously repeat this form, and alter it by exaggeration. Some nevertheless have talent, as Quarles, Herbert, Babington, Donne in particular, a pungent satirist, of terrible crudeness,1 a powerful poet, of a precise and intense imagination, who still preserves something of the energy and thrill of the original inspiration. But he deliberately abuses all these gifts, and

Quit, quit for shame: this will not move,

This cannot take her;

If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her.

The devil take her!'

Sir JOHN SUCKLING's Works, ed. A. Suckling, 1836, p. 70.

'As when a lady, walking Flora's bower,
Picks here a pink, and there a gilly-flower,
Now plucks a violet from her purple bed,
And then a primrose, the year's maidenhead,
There nips the brier, here the lover's pansy,
Shifting her dainty pleasures with her fancy;
This on her arms, and that she lists to wear
Upon the borders of her curious hair;
At length a rose-bud (passing all the rest)
She plucks, and bosoms in her lily breast.'

QUARLES, Chalmers' Cyclopædia of Engl. Lit. i. 140.
The following is against

'See in particular, his satire against the courtiers. imitators :

'But he is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Other's wits fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things outspue,
As his owne things; and they are his owne, 'tis true,
For if one eate my meate, though it be knowne
The meat was mine, th' excrement is his owne.'

DONNE'S Satires, 1639. Satire ii. p. 128.
When I behold a stream, which from the spring
Doth with doubtful melodious murmuring,
Or in a speechless slumber calmly ride
Her wedded channel's bosom, and there chide
And bend her brows, and swell, if any bough
Does but stoop down to kiss her utmost brow;
Yet if her often gnawing kisses win

The traiterous banks to gape and let her in,
She rusheth violently and doth divorce
Her from her native and her long-kept course,
And roares, and braves it, and in gallant scorn
In flatt'ring eddies promising return,

She flouts her channel, which thenceforth is dry,
Then say I That is she, and this am I.'

:

For

succeeds with great difficulty in concocting a piece of nonsense. instance, the impassioned poets had said to their mistress, that if they lost her, they should hate all other women. Donne, in order to eclipse them, says:

'O do not die, for I shall hate

All women so, when thou art gone,
That thee I shall not celebrate
When I remember thou wast one.'1

Twenty times while reading him we rub our brow, and ask with astonishment, how a man could so have tormented and contorted himself, strained his style, refined on his refinement, hit upon such absurd comparisons? But this was the spirit of the age; they made an effort to be ingeniously absurd. A flea had bitten Donne and his mistress. He

says:

"This flea is you and I, and this

Our mariage bed and mariage temple is.
Though Parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloyster'd in these living walls of Jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that selfe-inurder added be,

And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.'?

The Marquis de Mascarille3 never found anything to equal this. Would you have believed a writer could invent such absurdities? She and he made but one, for both are but one with the flea, and so one could not be killed without the other. Observe that the wise Malherbe wrote very similar enormities, in the Tears of St. Peter, and that the sonneteers of Italy and Spain reach simultaneously the same height of folly, and you will agree that throughout Europe at that time they were at the close of a poetical epoch.

On this boundary line of a closing and a dawning literature a poet appeared, one of the most fanciful and illustrious of his time, Abraham Cowley, a precocious child, a reader and a versifier like Pope, having known passions less than books, busied himself less about things than about words. Literary exhaustion has seldom been more manifest. He possesses all the capacity to say whatever pleases him, but he has just nothing to say. The substance has vanished, leaving in its place a hollow shadow. In vain he tries the epic, the Pindaric strophe, all kinds of stanzas, odes, little lines, long lines; in vain he calls to his assistance botanical and philosophical similes, all the erudition of the university, all the relics of antiquity, all the ideas of new science: we yawn as we read him. Except in a few descriptive verses, two or three

1 Poems, 1639: A Feaver, p. 15.

2 Ibid. The Flea, p. 1.
and exaggerates his
He also appears in

3 A valet in Molière's Les Précieuses Ridicules, who apes master's manners and style, and pretends to be a marquess. L'Etourdi and Le dépit Amoureux, by the same author.-TR. 1608-1667. I refer to the eleventh edition of 1710.

graceful tendernesses,1 he feels nothing, he speaks only; he is a poet of the brain. His collection of amorous pieces is but a vehicle for a scientific test, and serves to show that he has read the authors, that he knows his geography, that he is well versed in anatomy, that he has a dash of medicine and astronomy, that he has at his service references and allusions enough to break the head of his readers. He will speak in this wise:

'Beauty, thou active-passive Ill!

Which dy'st thyself as fast as thou dost kill!'

or will remark that his mistress is to blame for spending three hours every morning at her toilet, because

"They make that Beauty Tyranny,

That's else a Civil-government.'

After reading two hundred pages, you feel disposed to box his ears. You have to think, by way of consolation, that every age must draw to a close, that this one could not do so otherwise, that the old glow of enthusiasm, the sudden flood of rapture, images, capricious and audacious fancies, which once rolled through the mind of men, arrested now and cooled down, could only exhibit dross, a curdling scum, a multitude of brilliant and hurtful points. You say to yourself that, after all, Cowley had perhaps talent; you find that he had in fact one, a new talent, unknown to the old masters, the sign of a new culture, which needs other manners, and announces a new society. Cowley had these manners, and belongs to this society. He was a well-governed, reasonable, instructed, polished, well-trained man, who, after twelve years of service and writing in France, under Queen Henrietta, retires at last wisely into the country, where he studies natural history, and prepares a treatise on religion, philosophising on men and life, fertile in general reflections and ideas, a moralist, bidding his executor 'to let nothing stand in his writings which might seem the least in the world to be an offence against religion or good manners.' Such dispositions. and such a life produce and indicate less a poet, that is, a seer, a creator, than a literary man, I mean a man who can think and speak, and who therefore ought to have read much, learnt much, written much, ought to possess a calm and clear mind, to be accustomed to polished society, sustained conversation, a sort of raillery. In fact, Cowley is an author by profession, the oldest of those who in England deserve the name. His prose is as easy and sensible as his poetry is contorted and unreasonable. A polished man, writing for polished men, pretty much as he would speak to them in a drawing-room,—this I take to be the idea which they had of a good author in the seventeenth century. It is the idea which Cowley's Essays leave of his character; it is the kind of talent which the writers of the coming age take for their model; and

1 The Spring (The Mistress, i. 72).

he is the first of that grave and amiable group which, continued in Temple, reaches so far as to include Addison.

II.

Having reached this point, the Renaissance seemed to have attained its limit, and, like a drooping and faded flower, to be ready to leave its place for a new bud which began to rise from the ruins. At all events, a living and unexpected shoot sprang from the old declining stock. At the moment when art languished, science shot forth; the whole labour of the age ended in this. The fruits are not unlike; on the contrary, they come from the same sap, and by the diversity of the shape only manifest two distinct periods of the inner growth which has produced them. Every art ends in a science, and every poetry in a philosophy. For science and philosophy do but translate in precise formulas the original conception which art and poetry render sensible by imaginary figures: when once the idea of an epoch is manifested in verse by ideal creations, it naturally comes to be expressed in prose by positive arguments. That which had struck men on escaping from ecclesiastical oppression and monkish asceticism was the pagan idea of a life true to nature, and freely developed. They had found nature buried behind scholasticism, and they had expressed it in poems and paintings; in Italy by superb healthy corporeality, in England by vehement and unconventional spirituality, with such divination of its laws, instincts, and forms, that one might extract from their theatre and their pictures a complete theory both of soul and body. When enthusiasm is past, curiosity begins. The sentiment of beauty gives way to the sentiment of truth. The theory embraced in works of imagination is unfolded. The gaze continues fixed on nature, not to admire now, but to understand. From painting we pass to anatomy, from the drama to moral philosophy, from grand poetical divinations to great scientific views; the second continue the first, and the same spirit shows in both; for what art had represented, and science proceeds to observe, are living things, with their complex and complete structure, set in motion by their internal forces, with no supernatural intervention. Artists and savants, all set out, with no misgiving, from the master conception, to wit, that nature subsists of herself, that every existence has in its own womb the source of its action, that the causes of events are the innate laws of things; an all-powerful idea, from which was to issue the modern civilisation, and which, at the time I write of, produced in England and Italy, as before in Greece, genuine sciences, side by side with a complete art: after da Vinci and Michael Angelo, the school of anatomists, mathematicians, naturalists, ending with Galileo; after Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Shakspeare, the school of thinkers who surround Bacon and lead up to Harvey.

We have not far to look for this school. In the interregnum of Christianity the dominating bent of mind belongs to it. It was paganism