tive imagination and a heightened sense of color that leads us to feel that in this poet we have the appropriate representative of the brilliant autumn of the Elizabethan year. Like Browne and Wither, Drummond was imitative in the best sense of that word, and displays with them a skillful and artistic employment of previous models to a larger degree than that spontaneous outburst of innate song which critics are wont to attribute to the earlier lyrists.1 While recognizing this difference, I am sensible that it can easily be exaggerated and that "native wood-notes wild" are often in reality no more than that perfect art the crown of which is masterly concealment. A certain artificiality inheres in the artistic productions of all poets, and some there are, notably Herrick shortly after this, and Campion, Drummond, and Browne in this age, whose sense of artistic fitness has enabled them at times to surpass even the success of their masters.

The death of Fletcher may seem an arbitrary limit to put to a series of literary phenomena so unbroken as the lyrics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the year 1625, however, almost every lyrist of importance who had written in the reign of Elizabeth, had either completed his best work or ceased altogether to write; whilst of the Caroline poets that were to make the next reign musical, not one had yet begun to sing. Shakespeare and Beaumont were dead in 1616, Raleigh in 1618, Campion, Daniel, and Davison in the next year; Donne, Drayton, and Jonson survived until the thirties, but their poetry, especially their lyrical poetry, was earlier; and the most significant work of Browne, and even of Wither, and certainly of Drummond and the later song-writers, was concluded well before the accession of Charles.

1 See the notes on Drummond's poems in this volume for several instances of his borrowings from Sidney and others below p. 296.

We have thus traversed in the merest sketch that period of the history of English literature in which the lyric flourished as it has never flourished before or since in England. We found the Elizabethan lyric rising as one of the products of the Renaissance, rapidly developing amidst the culture of the court, thriving under the quickening impulses of national and urban life, and proceeding through a series of definite though superficial poetical fashions to triumph after triumph in a thousand forms of new and diverse beauty under the touch of men whose names must remain immortal, whilst our language continues to be read. Aside from the lofty and sustained excellence of this verse as a whole, and its extraordinary variety of mood and treatment, its most striking peculiarity consists in the wide contemporary distribution of a matchless gift of song, which like the rays of the sun shone impartially on all, from lords and courtiers such as Oxford, Essex, or Raleigh to the veriest literary hacks, Nashe, Munday, or Chettle; from the saintly Father Southwell to atheistical Marlowe ; visiting busy dramatists, like Heywood, Dekker, or Field, in the dull stretches of perfunctory toil; adorning the learning of Jonson and the scholarly leisure of Drummond; courting the condemned traitor Tychborne in his cell and the fallen statesman Bacon in his disgrace. Nor was this general ability to write excellent lyrical verse due to narrow interests or to the spirit of the dilettante, which rejoices in artistic trifling. On the contrary, the lyrical poetry of this incomparable age, with its sisterblossoms, the pastoral, the romantic epic, the drama, and its ample leafage of admirable prose, was the outcome of an intense and potent national spirit, seeking an outlet for its energies, not only in social, religious, and political channels, but in intellectual and emotional activities as well. The men that wrote these lyrics were often the men that bore

arms, or sat in the councils of their sovereign, men that scorned not the good opinion of their neighbors, nor the lands and beeves wherewith to support the shows of the world. It is an excellent thing to contemplate this great historical refutation of that inane theory which makes literature the pursuit of dreamers, or of abnormal departures from typical manhood, instead of a divine realization, by those who can see more deeply than the crowd, of the real image of man and of nature, towards which image the world is striving, but whereunto it reaches but seldom.

Not the least merit of Elizabethan literature, defining both words strictly, is its soundness and its health; its very lapses from decorum are those of childhood, and its extravagances those of youth and heated blood, both as far as possible removed from the cold cynicism, the doubt of man and God, that crept into England in the train of King James, and came in time to chill and benumb the pulses of the nation. The best lyrics of this age are redolent with this soundness and health, and still joyous with the flush of youth and beauty. There is but one way in which to know them, and that is to read them and to re-read them; to study them, not as the interesting products of an age to be patronized as unhappily not in the enjoyment of all the inestimable advantages of our own, but to recognize in them the living work of men, who were, save for their genius, much such men as we; to learn to understand them and through understanding to love them as one of the most exquisite and priceless heritages handed down to posterity through the lapse of years.

II.

ELIZABETHAN LYRICAL MEASURES.

The metrical forms, in which the lyric of the age of Elizabeth sought utterance, have been little studied: beyond the sonnet, scarcely studied at all. Even Dr. Schipper, whose excellent work on English Metres1 is surprisingly full of matter of even minor detail, leaps from the lyrical forms of Sidney to those of Jonson, Donne, and Drummond, and offers us no word of the metres of anthologies later than Tottel's Miscellany, of the song-books, of lyrics of the dramatists, or of the lyrical achievements of such metrists as Greene, Lodge, Breton, Barnes, Campion, and Wither. This is not the place for an extended study of this interesting subject, more especially as the interest attaching to questions of organic literary form often runs quite distinct from aesthetic or historical considerations.

It is familiar to scholars that modern English verse is the resultant of three forces, all of them contemporaneous in their action, but not in their origin, and varying in relative intensity. These forces or influences are represented (1) in the older national metre, the English representative of the original Teutonic metre; (2) in the several foreign metrical systems, chiefly Italian and French, derived either directly or through Chaucer; and (3) in the imitations of classical metres in English, for many years the experiment and diversion of the learned. Although several of the lyrists of this age, as Watson and Campion, display a graceful command of the composition of Latin verses, which must materially have aided them in the acquisition of a like facility in the mother tongue, this last influence may be disregarded,

1 Englische Metrik, 1889.

after emphasizing the great advantage that came from experiments of this kind, in disclosing the actual nature and limitations of the English language, and in improving the technique of verse. The older vernacular metres, too, exerted less influence on the lyric than might be supposed, although the earlier freedom as to number and distribution of syllables not infrequently asserts itself, or the mediæval fondness for the employment of alliteration for the sake of the jingle and not as a characteristic entering into the organism of the verse. It is to contemporary and earlier foreign models, then, that we must turn, if we are to find the chief motive, spirit, and much of the form of the Elizabethan lyric. Nor need this be understood to involve in question the genuine originality of the best of Elizabethan lyrists. The tree stood transplanting and flourished hardily until it became a new species in the colder air of England; but the tender scion long partook of the nature of the parent stem, and the lyric of England in the hands of mediocrity continued essentially an imitation of the lyric of Italy.

Reasons for this are not far to seek. The lyric must be neither learned nor provincial. Most of all forms of poetry must the lyric be the product of a refined and a cultivated taste. We have seen that the English lyric had its birth in cultivated courtly circles; for it was there that the artistic spirit was the purest, because it was there that it was closest to its source and inspiration, the Italy of the Renaissance, and least intermixed with extraneous elements. Indeed, after all, the English, no less than the Italians, were devotees of the new and passionate cult of beauty, delighting in glories of form and gorgeousness of color, whether displayed in glittering and jeweled robes of state, in splendid piles of fantastic and bizarre architecture, or in the flow and sweep of the sonorous and elaborated stanzas of The Faery Queen.

From an organic point of view the Elizabethan lyric