The Later Renaissance

ADIA'-SIDNEY'S STYLE-SHORT STORIES-NASH'S 'UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER'-NASH AND THE PAMPHLETEERS-MARTIN MARPRELATE-ORIGIN OF THE

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t masters of English prose were alive, and were working in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was Bacon, belong, by their character, their influence, and by the dates of their greatest achievements, to the generations described as Jacobean and Caroline. In the Elizabethan time proper th

ct is utterly mechanical, when very different matter was handled in the same style and often by the same men. Nash is always Nash, whether he was writing Christ's Tears over Jerusalem, or Have with you to Saffron Walden, or The Unfortunate Traveller. We shall be better

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exemplar of the second was Lyly. In neither case did the followers merely imitate their leader. There is much in Hooker which is not in Ascham. The enredados razones-the roundabout affectations of the authors of the Spanish Libros de Caballerías-may have had some influence on Sidney, who certainly knew them. Rabelais and Aretino were much read and imitated by some who also "parled Euphues." But the distinction holds good none the less. On the one side are those who, having something to say, were content to say it perspicuously. On the other were

inheritance from the reign of Henry VIII. It was the plain downright style of Ascha

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ontade, that superb and swelling words go well with daring deeds. The Elizabethans were so vehement and headlong, that they sought naturally for the "word of power," for the altisonant and ear-filling in language, and were more tolerant of bombast than of the pedestrian. The sentence. Their general inability to confine themselves to the sentence may be excused on the same ground. They felt so much, and so strongly, that they could not stop to disentangle and arrange. Certainly if Englishmen sinned in this respect it was against the[263] light. Models were not wanting to them, and they were not unaware of the virtue of being clear and coherent. Whoever the author of Martin Marprelate's Epistle may have been-Penry, Udall, Barrow, or another-he knew a bad sentence as well as any of the Queen Anne men. He fixes, as any of them might have done, on the confused heap of clauses which did duty for sentences in Dean John Bridges's Defence of the Government of the Church of England. "And learned brother Bridges," he wr

of his time. Take, for instance, this passage from Sir Walter Raleigh's account of the loss of the Revenge, published in 1591. He begins admirably: "All the powder of the Revenge was now spent, all her pikes were broken, forty of her best men slain, and the most part of the rest hurt." Several rapid sentences follow, and then we come to:[78] "Sir Richard finding himself in this distress, and unable any longer to make resistance having endured in this fifteen hours'[265] fight, the assault of fifteen several Armadoes, all by turns aboard him, and by estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults and entries, and that himself and the ship must needs be possessed by the enemy, who were now all cast in a ring about him; the Revenge n

erly constructed, does it mainly by good fortune. If it is more intelligible than Dr Bridges, the cause of the superiority li

he middle of the queen's reign, and they unfortunately became, and remained for long, exceedingly popular-Lyly's euphuism, and the wiredrawn finicking style of Sidney's Arcadia, to which no name has ever been given. The lives of these authors have already been dealt with under another head. Their style, as shown in their stories

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more it is watered the more it withereth, and the oftener it is lopped the sooner it dieth, so unbridled youth the more it is also by grave advice counselled or due correction controlled, the sooner it falleth to confusion, hating all reasons that would bring it from folly, as that tree doeth all remedies, that should make it fertile." Unbridled youth might have answered that if lopping and watering are bad for the cypress he must be a poor forester who persists in lopping and watering. But the youth of Queen Elizabeth's reign, which was unbridled enough, was also more respectful. It listened to the due correction and grave counsel of Euphues with deference. It did more, for it imitated him. The unbridled Nash euphuised, and so did many another. Alongside the fire from heaven, and elsewhere, of the Elizabethan time, there was an unending wishy-washy, though frequently turbid, flow of copy-book heading, which came from the great Lylyan source. It looks strange that a[268] time which loved Tamburlaine and produced the great lyric, should also have delighted in this square-toed finical vacuity. But perhaps, again, it is not so wonderful.

ition must have been about 1580 and later, but it was not published till after the author's death in 1584, and remains a fragment, though a large one. The Arcadia is much longer than the "tedious brief" masterpiece of Lyly, even without taking into account the verse, of which much is written in the classic metres. It is also far more interesting. Although we are accustomed to speak of it as a pastoral, mainly, it may be, on the strength of the name, it is much more a Libro de Caballerías. There is a pastoral element in it unquestionably, as there is in the stories of Feliciano de Silva, but in the main its matter is that of the books of "Knightly Deeds"-challenges and defiances, combats of champions, loves of cavaliers and ladies, the rout of mobs of plebeians by the single arm of the knight. There[270] are wicked knights who drag off ladies on the pommel of their saddles and beat them, good

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erías, published from thirty to forty years earlier, and certainly known to him. Such sentences as these send us back at once to Feliciano de Silva: "Most beloved lady, the incomparable excellences of yourself, waited on by the greatness of your estate, and the importance of the thing whereon my life consisteth, doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning and many circumstances in the uttering of my speech, both bold and fearful." And, "Since no words can carry with them the life of the inward feeling, I desire that my desire may be weighed in the balances of honour,

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n the two forces of the word "desire" is quite in the Spanish taste. The immediate success of Don Quixote in England may be explained not only by the permanent merits of Cervantes' romance, but by the fact that we had our examples of the literary affectation

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ent, but it cannot be said, with any measure of accuracy, that they have a place in the history of the English novel. They were part of the literary production of their time, but were mostly imitation, and were too completely forgotten, and too soon, to produce any effect. An exceptional interest attaches to Nash's Unfortunate Traveller, to[273] which attention has again been at

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ty. This is difficult to believe. Nothing can be more like Lazarillo's doings than the tricks which Nash's hero, Jack Wilton, plays on the old cider-selling lord and the captain. It would seem, however, that the time had not come when the picaresque method was to be really congenial to Englishmen. Nash wanders away from it when he introduces the story of Surrey and[274] the Fair Geraldine. Yet he comes back to it with the hero's love-affairs with Diamante, the wife of a Venetian, whom he meets in prison at Venice. He keeps to it very close when Wilton runs away with his "courtezan," and gives him

the pam

lection of ghost stories, The Terrors of the Night, and what he called Toys for Gentlemen, which are lost, and into the nature of which it is perhaps better not to inquire, were journalism before its time. His Have with you to Saffron Walden, a piece of vigorous literary horseplay at the expense of Gabriel Harvey, is an excellent pamphlet of its kind-in the kind of Mr Pott and Mr Slurk; while his burlesque almanac, called A wonderful strange and miraculous Astronomical Prognostication, though undoubtedly suggested by Rabelais, and therefore not quite original, is a piece of solemn fun worthy of the irony and the good sense of Swift. Nash had ideas of style which sometimes led him into involved pomposity, but which also supplied him with an effective, though blackguard, controversial manner. Nobody was a greater master of loud-mouthed bragging, of the fashion of telling an opponent over pages of repetition of the dreadful things you are going to do with him. Consciously, or unconsciously, the Elizabethans were great believers in the maxim that if you throw mud enough some will stick, and it was on

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from the day on which she found her power sufficiently established to allow her to disregard the Calvinist princes of the Continent-and a body of Englishmen who were desirous to adopt the Calvinist Presbyterian model.[84] According to our view the question was one to be argued peacefully, and those who could not believe the same things ought to have agreed to differ. That was not the opinion of any country, or of either side in the sixteenth century. The Puritans were as convinced of the need for uniformity as the Church or the Spanish Inquisition, and would have enforced it

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nounced a local money-lender from whom the archdeacon of the diocese wanted to borrow ￡100; and John Penry, an able, honest, but headlong Welshman. In or about March 1587 Penry published at Oxford a tract with a long-winded title, which is called for short The Equity of a Humble Supplication. It was an address to Parliament representing the undeniably neglected state of the Welsh parishes. Unfortunately for Penry, it contained one passage which, with no more unfairness than was usual in State prosecutions, whether conducted for the king or the Long Parliament, in the sixte

of satire in the controversy. Diotrephes was that person mentioned in the ninth verse of the Third Epistle of St John "who loveth to have the pre-eminence" and who "receiveth us not." It was a great belief among the Puritans that no minister should have authority over another, and that the bishops who had "pre-eminence" were "antichrists" and "petty popes." The dialogue tells how a bishop, a papist, a money-lender, and an innkeeper were all rebuked by Paul, a preacher. The usurer alone shows signs of compunction, while the b

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entlemen gave them help-notably Sir R. Knightley of Fawsley, in Northamptonshire (always a Puritan county), and Job Throckmorton, who appears to have been what we should now call a bitter anti-clerical. The press was concealed by them in different parts of the country till it was captured by the Earl of Derby. Penry was probably the leader of the fight on the Puritan side. It began by the publication of M

and counter-pamphleteers were called in on the bishops' side. This part of the controversy is no less obscure than the other. It has been guessed that Lyly and Nash struck in for the bishops. Both have been credited with the authorship of a Pappe with a Hatchet and An Almond for a

t when Martin Marprelate published his unlicensed Epistle he set an example which has been excellently well followed. His pamphlet stands at the head of the long list which includes the Areopagitica, the Anatomy of an Equivalent, the Public Spirit of the Whigs, the Shortest Way with the Dissenters, the

They are extremely unfair. But there is a great difference in their way of being unjust, and on that depends their literary value. The distinction is all to the honour of the Puritan pamphlets. Diotrephes shows both the doctrine and the spirit of the writers. They started by laying down the law to the effect that whoever exercises pre-eminence over his brethren in the ministry is an "antichrist" and a "petty pope," and that no church office not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament is Christian. Therefore they endeavoured to discredit the bishops by showing that they habitually did such acts as an antichrist and petty pope might be expected to do. We need not stop to argue that this was unjust. Of course it was, but from the literary point of view the interesting question is, How was the injustice worded? The Martin Marprelate men had a firm grip of the pamphlet style. The ridicule they poured on the long-winded sentences of Dr Bridges and Bishop Cooper shows that the

pride and rebellion," struck him harder, and[285] showed a finer wit than all the pamphleteers whom it has been in my power to see. They miss his vulnerable points, they bellow bad language and accusations of the kind of misconduct from which the Puritan was as free as the universal passions of humanity permitted. The difference between the two may be quite fairly put this way. The worst calumny of the Martinists can be quoted, but the anti-Martinists are naught when they are not using language which is nearly as unquotable as any written by the worst scribblers of the Restoration. The least nauseous passages are those in which these defenders of the Church gloat over the whips, branding-irons, and mutilating knife of

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ter, in 1553. His family was poor, and, like many of his contemporaries, he was educated by the kindness of patrons. Dr Jewel, the Bishop of Salisbury, and Edwin Sandys, then Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of York, successively protected him at Oxford. He was tutor to Sandys' sons. If Isaac Walton was correctly informed, he was somewhat tamely annexed by a scheming landlady as husband for her daughter. He had to resign his fellowship u

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not care much, but of a man who was very convinced, very earnest, and also very good. The Ecclesiastical Polity is not chiefly valuable as a piece of reasoning. It has for one thing not reached us complete. The first four books, which must have been begun while he was at the Temple, were published in 1594. The long fifth book appeared in 1597. The[288] three, which make up the total number of eight, were left unfinished at his death, and passed into careless, if not unfaithful, hands. But the five undoubted books were enough to do Hooker's work for the Church of England, and they did not do it by presenting his readers with such a closely reasoned and compact system as they might have found in the Institutions of Calvin. Englishmen have never cared much for consistency of system. It was enough for them that Hooker justified usages, ceremonies, and forms of Church government to which they were accustomed, against the "Disciplinarians" who condemned them for wanting the express authority of the New Testament, by proving that they had prevailed among pious men of former times, were in themselves innocent, and could therefore be accepted by sincere Christians as convenient, pious, and of good example, even if they had no "divine right," when they were imposed by authority. In substance this was no new doctrine. Her Majesty in Council had been saying as much for years, and so had Whitgift and Bridges, and all the defenders of the Establishment. But what they did by dry injunction or laboured schola