BACKWARDNESS OF ENGLISH CRITICISM NOT IMPLYING INFERIORITY—ITS CAUSE—THE INFLUENCE OF RHETORIC AND OTHER MATTERS—HAWES—THE FIRST TUDOR CRITICS—WILSON: HIS ‘ART OF RHETORIC’; HIS ATTACK ON “INKHORN TERMS”—HIS DEALING WITH FIGURES—CHEKE: HIS RESOLUTE ANGLICISM AND ANTI-PRECIOSITY—HIS CRITICISM OF SALLUST—ASCHAM—HIS PATRIOTISM—HIS HORROR OF ROMANCE, AND OF THE ‘MORTE D’ARTHUR’—HIS GENERAL CRITICAL ATTITUDE TO PROSE, AND TO POETRY—THE CRAZE FOR CLASSICAL METRES—SPECIAL WANTS OF ENGLISH PROSODY—ITS KINDS: (1) CHAUCERIAN—(2) ALLITERATIVE—(3) ITALIANATED—DEFICIENCIES OF ALL THREE—THE TEMPTATIONS OF CRITICISM IN THIS RESPECT—ITS ADVENTURERS: ASCHAM HIMSELF—WATSON AND DRANT—GASCOIGNE—HIS ‘NOTES OF INSTRUCTION’—THEIR CAPITAL VALUE—SPENSER AND HARVEY—THE PURITAN ATTACK ON POETRY—GOSSON—‘THE SCHOOL OF ABUSE’—LODGE’S ‘REPLY’—SIDNEY’S ‘APOLOGY FOR POETRY’—ABSTRACT OF IT—ITS MINOR SHORTCOMINGS AND MAJOR HERESIES—THE EXCUSES OF BOTH, AND THEIR AMPLE COMPENSATION—KING JAMES’S ‘REULIS AND CAUTELIS’—WEBBE’S ‘DISCOURSE’—SLIGHT IN KNOWLEDGE, BUT ENTHUSIASTIC, IF UNCRITICAL, IN APPRECIATION—PUTTENHAM’S (?) ‘ART OF ENGLISH POESIE’—ITS ERUDITION—SYSTEMATIC ARRANGEMENT AND EXUBERANT INDULGENCE IN FIGURES—MINORS: HARINGTON, MERES, WEBSTER, BOLTON, ETC.—CAMPION AND HIS ‘OBSERVATIONS’—DANIEL AND HIS ‘DEFENCE OF RHYME’—BACON—THE ‘ESSAYS’—THE ‘ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING’—ITS DENUNCIATION OF MERE WORD-STUDY—ITS VIEW OF POETRY—SOME “OBITER DICTA”—THE WHOLE OF VERY SLIGHT IMPORTANCE—STIRLING’S “ANACRISIS”—BEN JONSON: HIS EQUIPMENT—HIS ‘PREFACES,’ ETC.—THE DRUMMOND CONVERSATIONS—THE ‘DISCOVERIES’—FORM OF THE BOOK—ITS DATE—MOSAIC OF OLD AND NEW—THE FLING AT MONTAIGNE—AT ‘TAMERLANE’—THE SHAKESPEARE PASSAGE—AND THAT ON BACON—GENERAL CHARACTER OF THE BOOK.

The fortune of England in matters political has often been noticed; and it has at least deserved to be noticed, hardly less often, in matters literary. One of the luckiest of these chances came at the time of the Renaissance; when the necessary changes were effected with the minimum of direct foreign influence, and so slowly that the natural force of the nation and the language was able completely, or almost completely, to assimilate the influences, both foreign and classical, that rained upon it.

Nor was this least the case in respect of criticism.^[198] The history of this part of English literary evolution has been, until recently, much neglected; and it can hardly be said even yet to have received comprehensive attention. Backwardness of English Criticism not implying inferiority. It is all the more necessary to bestow some time and pains on it here, with at least some fair hope of correcting an unfair depreciation. The Baron of Bradwardine (displaying that shrewd appreciation of contrast between English and Scottish characteristics which belonged, if not to himself, to his creator) remarked to Colonel Talbot that it was the Colonel’s “humour, as he [the Baron] had seen in other gentlemen of birth and honour” in the Colonel’s country, “to derogate from the honour of his burgonet.” Gentlemen of the most undoubted birth and honour (as such things go in literature), from Dryden to Matthew Arnold, have displayed this humour in regard to English criticism. But there has been something too much of it; and it has been taken far too literally by the ignorant. M. Brunetière has expressed his opinion that Frenchmen would make un véritable marché de dupe if they exchanged Boileau, Marmontel, La Harpe, and Co. for Lessing and some others. I shall not in this place express any opinion on that question directly. But, if this book does what I shall endeavour to make it do, it will at least show that to exchange, for any foreign company, our own critics, from Sidney and Ben Jonson, through Dryden and Addison, Samuel Johnson and Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt, to Mr Arnold himself, would be “un véritable marché de”—Moses Primrose.

It will have been sufficiently seen in the last volume that the backwardness of English—a backwardness long exaggerated, but to some extent real, and to no small extent healthy—was nowhere exhibited more distinctly than in the department which supplies the materials of this history. Until the close of the fifteenth century, and for some decades afterwards, not a single critical treatise on English existed in the English language, or even in Latin; the nearest approach, even in fragment, to any utterance of the kind being the naïf and interesting, but only infantinely critical, remarks of Caxton in his prefaces.^[199]

The fact is that, not only until a nation is in command of a single form of “curial” speech for literary purposes, but until sufficient experiments have been made in at least a majority of the branches of literature, criticism is impossible, and would, if possible, be rather mischievous than beneficial. Its cause. Now England, though it possessed at least one very great author, and more than a fair number of respectable seconds to him, was, up to 1500 at least, in neither case. Till the end of the fourteenth century it had been practically trilingual; it was bilingual till past the end of the fifteenth, if not till far into the seventeenth, so far as literature was concerned. Nor, till the towering eminence of Chaucer had helped to bring the vernacular into prominence, was there any one settled dialect of primacy in the vernacular itself. Further, the fifteenth century was nearly at its end before any bulk of prose, save on religious subjects, was written; and for another century the proportion of translation over original work in prose was very large indeed.

At the same time the scholastic Rhetoric—which had always played to criticism the part of a half-faithless guardian, who keeps his pupil out of the full enjoyment of his property, yet preserves that property in good condition to hand over to him perforce at some future time—was still faithfully taught.^[200] The influence of Rhetoric and other matters. The enlarged and more accurate study of the classics at the Revival of Learning set classical criticism once more before students in the originals; the eager study of those originals by Continental scholars was sure to reflect itself upon England; and, lastly, religious zeal and other motives combined, here as elsewhere, to make men determined to get the vernacular into as complete and useful a condition as possible. Nowhere does the intense national spirit, which is the glory of the Tudor period, appear more strongly than in this our scholastic and “umbratile” division of the national life.

Long, indeed, before this scholastic and regular criticism made its appearance, and during the whole course of the fifteenth century, critical appreciation, stereotyped and unmethodised it may be, but genuine for all that, and stimulating, had made its appearance. Hawes. The extraordinary quality of Chaucer, the amiable pastime-making of Gower, and, a little later, the busy polygraphy and painful rhetoric of Lydgate, had, almost from the moment of Chaucer’s death, attracted and inspired students. The pretty phrase about Chaucer’s “gold dew-drops of speech,” which justly drew the approval of a critic so often unjustly severe on ante-Renaissance work as Mr Arnold, was, as is known even by tyros in the study of English literature, repeated, expanded, varied by almost every prominent writer for a century and a quarter at least, till it reaches, not exactly final, but most definite and noteworthy, expression in the work of Stephen Hawes, that curious swan-singer of English mediæval poetry. In the to us eccentric, if not positively absurd, exposition of the Trivium and Quadrivium which diversifies the account of the courtship of Grandamour and La Bell Pucell,^[201] the praise of the Three is led up to by a discussion of Rhetoric and Poetics so elaborate and minute that it occupies more space than is given to all the other Arts together, and nearly double that which is given to all the rest, except a largely extended Astronomy. Rhetoric herself, after being greeted by and greeting her pupil in the most “aureate” style, divides herself into five parts, each of which has its chapter, with a “Replication against ignorant Persons” intervening, and many curious digressions such as the description of a sort of Earthly Paradise of Literature with four rivers, “Understanding,” “Closely-Concluding,” “Novelty,” and “Carbuncles,”^[202] and a “Tower of Virgil” in their midst. Lydgate has been already praised for “versifying the depured rhetoric in English language,” but he comes up once more for eulogy as “my master” in the peroration, and has in fact considerably more space than either Gower or Chaucer. Nor, confused and out of focus as such things must necessarily appear to us, should we forget that Hawes and his generation were not altogether uncritically endeavouring at what was “important to them”—the strengthening and enriching, namely, of English vocabulary, the extension of English literary practice and stock.

Yet their criticism could but be uncritical: and the luck above referred to appears first in the peculiar scholastic character of the criticism of the first English school of critics deserving the name. The first Tudor critics. No one of its members was exactly a man of genius, and this was perhaps lucky; for men of genius have rarely been observed to make the best schoolmasters. All were fully penetrated with the Renaissance adoration of the classics; and this was lucky again, because the classics alone could supply the training and the models just then required by English prose, and even to some extent by English poetry. All were very definitely set against Gallicising and Italianising; and yet again this was lucky, because England had been overdosed with French influence for centuries, while their opposition to Italian did perhaps some good, and certainly little harm. But all were thoroughly possessed by the idea that English, adjusted to classical models as far as possible, but not denationalised or denaturalised, ought to be raised into a sufficient medium of literary, as of familiar, communication for Englishmen. And—with that intense Renaissance belief in education, and a high and noble kind of education too, which puts to shame the chattering and pottering of certain later periods on this unlucky subject—all were determined, as far as in them lay, to bring English up to this point. The tendency was spread over a great number of persons, and a considerable period of time. Its representatives ranged from healthy and large-souled, if not quite heroic or inspired, scholars like Ascham to “acrid-quack” pedants like Gabriel Harvey. But the chief of these representatives were the well-known trio, of whom one has just been mentioned—Sir^[203] Thomas Wilson, Sir John Cheke, and Roger Ascham. They were all friends, they were all contemporary members (to her glory be it ungrudgingly said) of one University, the University of Cambridge, and though the moral character of all, and especially of the first two, had something of the taints of self-seeking and of sycophancy, which were the blemishes of the Tudor type of writers, all had the merits of that type as exhibited in the man of the study rather than of the field—intense curiosity and industry, a real patriotism, a half-instinctive eagerness to action, a consciousness how best to adorn the Sparta that had fallen to their lot, and a business-like faculty of carrying their conceptions out. From various indications, positive and indirect, it would seem that Cheke, who was the eldest, was also the most “magnetic,” the most Socratically suggestive and germinal of the three: but his actual literary work is of much inferior importance to that of Ascham and Wilson.

Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric^[204] is, as the other dates given in the text and notes will show sufficiently, by no means the first book of the school; nor is it that which has, on the whole, the most interest for us. Wilson: his Art of Rhetoric; But it deserves precedence historically because, as no other does, it keys, or gears, the new critical tendency on to the old technical rhetoric. The first edition appeared in 1553, dedicated to Edward VI. Wilson dates his prologue to the second^[205] on the 7th December 1560; but it does not seem to have been published till 1563. Between the date of the first edition and the writing of this Prologue, Wilson, an exile at Rome, had fallen into the claws of the Inquisition as author of the book and of another on Logic; and, as he recounts with natural palpitation, escaped literally “so as by fire,” his prison-house being in flames.

His two first Books Wilson faithfully devotes to all the old technicalities—Invention, Disposition, Amplification, “States,” and the rest. his attack on “Inkhorn terms.” But his third Book, “Of Elocution,”^[206] announces from the first an interest in the matter very different from the jejune rehashings of the ancients (and chiefly of those ancients least worth rehashing) which the mediæval Rhetorics mostly give us. In fact, Wilson had shown himself alive to the importance of the subject in the very opening of the work itself^[207] by recounting, with much gusto, how “Phavorinus the Philosopher (as Gellius telleth the tale) did hit a young man over the thumbs very handsomely for using over-old and over-strange words.” And as soon as he has divided the requirements of Elocution under the four heads of Plainness, Aptness, Composition, and Exornation, he opens the stop which has been recognised as his characteristic one, by denouncing “strange inkhorn terms.” He inveighs against the “far-journeyed gentlemen” who, on their return home, as they love to go in foreign apparel, so they “powder their talk with oversea language,” one talking French-English, another “chopping in” with English-Italianated. Professional men, lawyers and auditors, have their turn of censure, and a real literary “document” follows in the censure of the “fine courtier who will talk nothing but Chaucer.” Most copious is he against undue “Latining” of the tongue, in illustration of which he gives a letter from a Lincolnshire gentleman which may owe royalty either to the Limousin Scholar of Rabelais, or even to Master Francis’ own original, Geoffrey Tory himself. And he points the same moral (very much after the manner of Latimer, for whom, as elsewhere appears, he had a great admiration) by divers facetious stories from his experience, “when I was in Cambridge, and student in the King’s College,” and from other sources. After which he falls in with Cicero as to the qualifications of words allowable.

“Aptness” follows: and here Sir Thomas, without knowing it, has cut at a folly of language revived three hundred years and more later than his own time. His dealing with Figures. For he laughs at one who, “seeing a house fair-builded,” said to his fellow, “Good Lord, what a handsome phrase of building is this!” Wilson’s butt would have been no little thought of by certain persons at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Indeed, one may seem to remember a sentence about the merits of a “passage” in a marble chimney-piece, which is a mere echo, conscious or unconscious, of his “phrase.” The same temper appears in the longer remarks on Composition; but when we come to Exornation, “a gorgeous beautifying of the tongue with borrowed words and change of sentence,” Wilson’s lease of originality has run out. He is still in the bondage of the Figures, which he describes ambitiously as a kind “not equally sparpled^[208] about the whole oration, but so dissevered and parted as stars stand in the firmament, or flowers in a garden, or pretty-devised antiques in a cloth of Arras.” The enumeration is full of character and Elizabethan piquancy; but it still has the old fault of beginning at the wrong end. When a man writes even a good oration, much more that far higher thing a good piece of prose (which may be an oration, if need serves, or anything else), he does not say to himself, “Now I shall throw in some hyperbaton; now we will exhibit a little anadiplosis; this is the occasion surely for a passage of zeugma.” He writes as the spirit moves him, and as the way of art leads. One could wish, in reading Wilson, for another Sir Thomas, to deal with the Figurants as he has dealt with the Chaucerists and the Lincolnshire Latinisers. But we must not expect too much at once: and lucky are we if we often, or even sometimes, get so bold a striking out into new paths for a true end as we find in this Art of Rhetoric.

Cheke has left no considerable English work, and he seems—as it is perhaps inevitable that at least some of the leaders in every period of innovation should seem—to have pushed innovation itself to and over the verge of crotchet. Cheke: his resolute Anglicism and anti-preciosity. He was a spelling and pronouncing reformer both in Greek and English; and, classical scholar and teacher as he was, he seems to have fallen in with that curious survival of “Saxon” rendering of words not of Saxon origin, the great storehouse of which is the work of Reginald Pecock a century earlier. But he appears to have been one of the main and most influential sources of the double stream of tendency observable in Wilson himself, and still more in Ascham—the tendency on the one hand to use the classics as models and trainers in the formation of a generally useful and practicable English style, and on the other to insist that neither from classical nor from any other sources should English be adulterated by “inkhorn terms,” as Wilson calls them,^[209] of any kind—that is to say, by archaisms, technicalities, preciousnesses, fished up as it were from the bottom of the ink-pot, instead of simply and naturally taken as they came from its surface to the pen. What Ascham tells us that he said of Sallust is the spirit, the centre, the kernel, of the criticism of the whole school—a dread that is to say, and a dislike and a censure of what he calls the “uncontented care to write better than he could.”^[210] And it must be obvious that this sharply formulated censure is itself a critical point de repère of the greatest value. It is well that it was not too much listened to—for the greatest results of English prose and verse in the great period, beginning a few years after Cheke’s death and continuing for an old man’s lifetime, were the result of this “never contented care,” which still reached something better than content. But if, at this early period, it had had too much way given to it, if the vigorous but somewhat sprawling infancy of Elizabethan English had been bid and let sprawl simply at its pleasure, the consequences could not but have been disastrous.

This criticism of Sallust, which may be found at length in Ascham’s Schoolmaster,^[211] is quite a locus in its kind. His criticism of Sallust. It is not of the justest, for the prepossession of the sentence quoted above (which stands in the forefront of it) colours it all through. It has funny little scholastic lapses in logic, such as the attempt to apply the old brocard Orator est vir bonus dicendi peritus to the disadvantage of Sallust, as compared not only with Cicero but with Cæsar, on the score of morality. It would have been pleasant to observe the countenances of Fausta and Servilia if this had been argued in their joint presence. And the dislike of Thucydides, to which a disliker of Sallust is almost necessarily driven, argues a literary palate not of the most refined. But the disposition of the supposed causes of the faults of Sallust’s style, when, having sown his wild oats, he took to literature, and borrowed his vocabulary from Cato and Varro, and his method from Thucydides himself, is an exceedingly ingenious piece of critical pleading. Even if it will not hold water, it shows us a stage of criticism advanced, in some directions, beyond anything that classical or mediæval times can show. The other great “place” of Cheke’s writing occurs in his letter^[212] to Hoby on that learned knight’s translation of Castiglione, with its solemn judgment (the author, though but in middle age, was ill, and in fact almost dying), “I am of this opinion, that our own tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues, wherein if we take no heed betimes, ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep house as a bankrupt.” The analogy, of course, is a false one:—there is no need to pay, nor possibility of payment, any more than a conquering monarchy needs to fear the repayment of the tribute it draws from others, or than a sturdy plant need dread bankruptcy because it owes nourishment to earth, and air, and the rain of heaven. But once more the position is a definite, and not a wholly untenable, critical position: and Cheke shows himself here as at once engineer and captain of it.

The chief representative of this school is, however, beyond question, the always agreeable, and but seldom other than admirable, author of Toxophilus and The Schoolmaster himself.^[213] Ascham. His positive achievements in English literature do not here directly concern us; nor does the debate between those who regard him as a Euphuist before Euphuism, and those who will have him to be the chief example of the plain style in early Elizabethan literature. I confess myself to be on the side of the latter; though I know what the former mean. But it is with what Ascham thought as a critic, not with what he did as a writer, that we are here busy; and on this there is no reasonable opening for serious difference of opinion. Ascham’s critical position and opinions are clear, not only from his two famous and pleasant little books, but from the constant literary references in his letters, ranging from elaborate lucubrations on the study of the classics to an amusing little Cambridge fling at the older university, where, as we learn from a letter of exactly the middle of the century, taste was in so shocking a condition that Oxford men actually paid more attention to Lucian and Apuleius than to Cicero and Xenophon.^[214]

The Toxophilus itself is a critical document in parts, both for the initial manifesto of his desire “to write this English matter in the English tongue for English men,” and for the more elaborate defence of the proceeding (a defence repeated in the numerous Latin letters accompanying the copies of the book he sent to his friends), as well as for one of those hits at Romance which were characteristic of Renaissance scholars too generally, and were particularly to be expected in very moral and rather prosaic persons like Ascham. But we necessarily turn to the Schoolmaster for a full exposition of Ascham’s critical ethos, and we find it.

A tendency rather to slight poetry, one great heresy concerning it (of which more presently), and the above-mentioned contempt or even horror of romance—these are the worst things to be noted here. His horror of Romance, All these are connected with a wider critical heresy, which is prevalent in England to this day, and which emerges most interestingly in this infancy of English criticism. This heresy is the valuing of examples, and even of whole kinds, of literary art, not according to their perfection on their own artistic standards, not according to the quantity or quality of artistic pleasure which they are fitted to give; but according to certain principles—patriotic, political, ethical, or theological—which the critic holds or does not hold, as the case may be. This fallacy being one of those proper—or, at least, inseparably accidental—to the human intellect, is of course perceptible enough in antiquity itself. It is, as we have seen, rife in Plato, and more rife in Plutarch; and there is no doubt that the devotion of the Renaissance to the greatest of Greek philosophers and prosemen, to the most entertaining of Greek biographers and moralists, had not a little to do with its reappearance, though the struggle of the Reformation, and the national jealousies which this struggle bred or helped, had more. But no one has given more notable examples of it than Ascham by his attack on “books of feigned chivalry,” in Toxophilus,^[215] and his well-known censure of the Morte d’Arthur in The Schoolmaster.^[216]

Than this book there was, at Ascham’s date, no more exquisite example of English prose in existence. There is not to this day a book, either in prose or in verse, which has more of the true Romantic charm. and of the Morte d’Arthur. There are few better instances anywhere of subtly combined construction of story than are to be found in some of its parts; and, to a catholic judgment, which busies itself with the matter and spirit of a book, there are few books which teach a nobler temper of mind, which inculcate with a more wonderful blending of sternness and sympathy the great moral that “the doer shall suffer,” that “for all these things God shall bring us into judgment,” or which display more accomplished patterns of man and sweeter examples of woman. Yet Ascham (and he had read the book) saw in it nothing but “open manslaughter and bold bawdry.”

Apart from this somewhat Philistine prudery—which occupies itself more reasonably with Italian novelle, and the translations of them into English—Ascham’s criticism is of a piece with that of the whole school in all but a very few points. He differed with Wilson, and with most of the scholars of his time, on the subject of translation, which he rightly enough regarded as a useful engine of education, but as quite incapable of giving any literary equivalent for the original. He agreed both with Wilson and with Cheke as to the impropriety of adulterating English with any foreign tongue, ancient or modern. He was, all the same, an exceedingly fervent Ciceronian and devotee of the golden age of Latin. And when we come in one^[217] of his letters to Sturm on the name of Pigna (v. supra, p. 62), the rival of Cinthio Giraldi, there seems to be established a contact, of the most interesting, between English and Italian criticism. But (as indeed we might have expected) no allusion to Pigna’s view of the despised romances is even hinted: it is his dealing with the aureolum libellum of Horace that Ascham has read, his dealings with Aristotle and Sophocles that he wishes to read.

Putting his theory and his practice together, and neglecting for the moment his moral “craze,” we can perceive in him a tolerably distinct ideal of English prose, which he has only not illustrated by actual criticism of the reviewing sort, because the material was so scanty. His general critical attitude to Prose, This prose is to be fashioned with what may be excusably called a kind of squint—looking partly at Latin and Greek construction and partly at English vernacular usage. It does not seem that, great as was his reverence for Cheke, he was bitten by Cheke’s mania for absolute Teutonism; nor does he appear to have gone to the extreme of Latimer and Latimer’s admirer, Wilson, in caring to mingle merely familiar speech with his ordered vernacular. But he went some way in this direction: he was by no means proof against that Delilah of alliteration which, like a sort of fetch or ghost of the older alliterative prosody, bewitched the mid-sixteenth-century verse and prose of England, and had not lost hold on Spenser himself. And he had belief in certain simple Figures of the antithetic and parallel kind. But he was, above all, a schoolmaster—as even being dead he spoke—to English literature; and his example and his precepts together tended to establish a chastened, moderately classical, pattern of writing, which in the next generation produced the admirable English prose of Hooker, and was not without influence on the less accomplished, but more germinal and protreptic, style of Jonson.

We must praise him less when we come to poetry. and to Poetry. The history of the craze for classical metre and against rhyme in England, which practically supplies our earliest subject of purely critical debate, is a very curious one, and may—perhaps must—be considered from more points of view than one, before it is rightly and completely understood. At first sight it looks like mere mid-summer madness—the work of some Puck of literature—if not even as the incursion into the calm domains of scholarship and criticism of that popular delirium tremens, which has been often illustrated in politics. Shifting of the standpoint, and more careful consideration, will discover some excuses for it, as well as much method in it. But it must be regarded long, and examined carefully, before the real fact is discovered—the fact that, mischievous and absurd as it was in itself, unpardonable as are the attempts to revive it, or something like it, at this time of day, it was in its own day a kind of beneficent “distemper”—a necessary, if morbid, stage in the development of English prosody and English criticism.

Inasmuch as the most obvious and indubitable, as well as universal, cause of the craze was the profound Renaissance admiration for the classics, it was inevitable that something of the kind should make its appearance in most European countries. The craze for Classical Metres. But other and counteracting causes prevented it from assuming, in any of them, anything like the importance that it attained in England. Unrhymed classical metres, like almost every literary innovation of the time, had been first attempted in Italy;^[218] but the established and impregnable supremacy of forms like the Sonnet, the Canzone, the ottava and terza rima, put rhyme out of real danger there. They were attempted in France.^[219] But French had for centuries possessed a perfectly well-defined system of prosody, adapted and adequate to the needs and nature of the language. And, moreover, the singularly atonic quality of this language, its want not only of the remotest approach to quantity but even of any decided accent, made the experiment not merely ridiculous, as indeed it mostly was in English, but all but impossible. Spanish was following Italian, and did not want to follow anything else: and German was not in case to compete.

With English the patient was very much more predisposed to the disease. Special wants of English Prosody. Not only two, but practically three, different systems of prosody, which were really to some extent opposed to each other, and might well seem more opposed than they actually were, disputed, in practice, the not too fertile or flourishing field of English poetry. There was the true Chaucerian system of blended English prosody, the legitimate representative of the same composite influences which have moulded English language, and which had been slowly developed through the half-chaotic beginnings of Middle English verse, and then with almost premature suddenness perfected up to a certain stage by Chaucer himself. Its kinds: (1)Chaucerian. This system combined—though not yet in perfect freedom—the strict syllabic foot-division of the French with the syllabic licence of Anglo-Saxon, so as to produce a system of syllabic equivalence similar in nature to, if not yet fully in practice freer than, that of the Greek Iambic trimeter. It admitted a considerable variety of metres, the base-integers of which were the octosyllable and decasyllable, with lines of six, twelve, and others occasionally, combined in pairs or arranged in stanzas of more or less intricate forms. But—by a historic accident which has even yet to be rather taken as found than fully explained—nobody for more than a hundred years had been able to produce really good regular^[220] poetry in Southern English by this metre, and certain changes in pronunciation and vocabulary—especially the disuse of the final vocalised e—were putting greater and greater difficulties in the way of its practice.

Secondly, there was the revived alliterative metre, either genuine—that is to say, only roughly syllabic and not rhymed, but rhythmed nearer to the anapæstic form than to any other—or allied with rhyme, and sometimes formed into stanzas of very considerable intricacy. (2) Alliterative. This, which had arisen during the fourteenth century, no one quite knows how or where, apparently in the North, and which had maintained a vigorous though rather artificial life during the fifteenth, had not wholly died out, being represented partly by the ballad metre, by doggerel twelves, fourteeners, and other long shambling lines, and by a still lively tendency towards alliteration itself, both in metred verse and in prose. Latterly, during Ascham’s own youth, a sort of rapprochement between these two had made the fourteeners and Alexandrines, rather less doggerelised, very general favourites; but had only managed to communicate to them a sort of lolloping amble, very grievous and sickening to the delicate ear.