Thomas Dekker.

“An ancient seat of Kings, a second Troy,Y’compassed round with a commanding sea;Her people are y-clepédAngeli.This paragon, this only, this is sheIn whom do meet so many gifts in oneIn honor of whose name the muses sing.”

“An ancient seat of Kings, a second Troy,

Y’compassed round with a commanding sea;

Her people are y-clepédAngeli.

This paragon, this only, this is she

In whom do meet so many gifts in one

In honor of whose name the muses sing.”

Yet even such praises did not keep poor Peele from hard fare and a stinging lack of money.

“An Old Wives Tale,” which he wrote, has conjurers and dragons in it, with odd twists of language which remind one of the kindred and nonsensical jingle of “Patience” or “Pinafore:”—

“Phillida, Philleridos—pamphilida, florida, flortos;Dub—dub a-dub, bounce! quoth the gunsWith a sulpherous huff-snuff!”

“Phillida, Philleridos—pamphilida, florida, flortos;

Dub—dub a-dub, bounce! quoth the guns

With a sulpherous huff-snuff!”

This play is further notable for having supplied much of the motive for the machinery and movement of Milton’s noble poem ofComus. It is worth one’s while to compare the two. Of course Peele will suffer—as those who make beginnings always do.

This writer is said to have been sometime a shareholder with Shakespeare in the Blackfriars Theatre; he was an actor, too, like his great contemporary; and besides the plays which carried awordy bounce in them, wrote a very tender scriptural drama about King David and the fair Bethsabe, with charming quotable things in it. Thus—

“Bright Bethsabe gives earth to my desires,Verdure to earth, and to that verdure—flowers;To flowers—sweet odors, and to odors—wingsThat carries pleasure to the hearts of Kings!”

“Bright Bethsabe gives earth to my desires,

Verdure to earth, and to that verdure—flowers;

To flowers—sweet odors, and to odors—wings

That carries pleasure to the hearts of Kings!”

And again:—

“Now comes my lover tripping like the roe,And brings my longings tangled in her hairTo joy her love, I’ll build a Kingly bowerSeated in hearing of a hundred streams.”

“Now comes my lover tripping like the roe,

And brings my longings tangled in her hair

To joy her love, I’ll build a Kingly bower

Seated in hearing of a hundred streams.”

Tom Campbell said—“there is no such sweetness to be found in our blank verse anterior to Shakespeare.” And for his lyrical grace I cannot resist this little show, from his “Arraignment of Paris:”—

Ænone [singeth and pipeth].“Fair and fair, and twice so fair,As fair as any may be;The fairest shepherd on our green,A love for any lady.”And Paris.“Fair and fair and twice so fair,As fair as any may be:Thy love is fair for thee aloneAnd for no other lady.”Then Ænone.“My love is fair, my love is gay,As fresh as bin the flowers in May,And of my love my roundelay,My merry, merry, merry roundelay,Concludes with Cupid’s curse,They that do change old love for new,Pray Gods, they change for worse!”

Ænone [singeth and pipeth].

“Fair and fair, and twice so fair,As fair as any may be;The fairest shepherd on our green,A love for any lady.”

“Fair and fair, and twice so fair,

As fair as any may be;

The fairest shepherd on our green,

A love for any lady.”

And Paris.

“Fair and fair and twice so fair,As fair as any may be:Thy love is fair for thee aloneAnd for no other lady.”

“Fair and fair and twice so fair,

As fair as any may be:

Thy love is fair for thee alone

And for no other lady.”

Then Ænone.

“My love is fair, my love is gay,As fresh as bin the flowers in May,And of my love my roundelay,My merry, merry, merry roundelay,Concludes with Cupid’s curse,They that do change old love for new,Pray Gods, they change for worse!”

“My love is fair, my love is gay,

As fresh as bin the flowers in May,

And of my love my roundelay,

My merry, merry, merry roundelay,

Concludes with Cupid’s curse,

They that do change old love for new,

Pray Gods, they change for worse!”

Dekker was fellow of Peele and of the rest;[108]he quarrelled bitterly with Ben Jonson—they beating each other vilely with bad words, that can be read now (by whoso likes such reading) in thePoetasterof Jonson, or in theSatiromastixof Dekker. ’Twould be unfair, however, to judge him altogether by his play of the cudgels in this famous controversy. There is good meat in what Dekker wrote: he had humor; he had pluck; he had gift for using words—to sting or to praise—or to beguile one. There are traces not only of a Dickens flavorin him, but of a Lamb flavor as well; and there is reason to believe that, like both these later humorists, he made his conquests without the support of a university training. Swinburne characterizes him as a “modest, shiftless, careless nature:” but he was keen to thrust a pin into one who had offended his sensibilities; in his plays he warmed into pretty lyrical outbreaks, but never seriously measured out a work of large proportions, or entered upon execution of such with a calm, persevering temper. He was many-sided, not only literary-wise, but also conscience-wise. It seems incredible that one who should write the coarse things which appear in hisBachelor’s Banquetshould also have elaborated, with a pious unction (that reminds of Jeremy Taylor) the saintly invocations of theFoure Birds of Noah’s Ark: and as for hisDreameit shows in parts a luridness of color which reminds of our own Wigglesworth—as if this New England poet of fifty years later may have dipped his brush into the same paint-pot. I cite a warm fragment from hisDreame of the Last Judgement;—

“Their cries, nor yelling did the Judge regard,For all the doores of Mercy up were bar’d:Justice and Wrath in wrinkles knit his forhead,And thus he spake: You cursed and abhorred,You brood of Sathan, sonnes of death and hell,In fires that still shall burne, you still shall dwell;In hoopes of Iron: then were they bound up strong,(Shrikes [shrieks] being the Burden of their dolefull song)Scarce was Sentence breath’d-out, but mine eiesEven saw (me thought) a Caldron, whence did riseA pitchy Steeme of Sulphure and thick Smoake,Able whole coapes of Firmament to choake:About this, Divels stood round, still blowing the fire,Some, tossing Soules, some whipping them with wire,Across the face, as up to th’ chins they stoodIn boyling brimstone, lead and oyle, and bloud.”

“Their cries, nor yelling did the Judge regard,

For all the doores of Mercy up were bar’d:

Justice and Wrath in wrinkles knit his forhead,

And thus he spake: You cursed and abhorred,

You brood of Sathan, sonnes of death and hell,

In fires that still shall burne, you still shall dwell;

In hoopes of Iron: then were they bound up strong,

(Shrikes [shrieks] being the Burden of their dolefull song)

Scarce was Sentence breath’d-out, but mine eies

Even saw (me thought) a Caldron, whence did rise

A pitchy Steeme of Sulphure and thick Smoake,

Able whole coapes of Firmament to choake:

About this, Divels stood round, still blowing the fire,

Some, tossing Soules, some whipping them with wire,

Across the face, as up to th’ chins they stood

In boyling brimstone, lead and oyle, and bloud.”

It is, however, as a social photographer that I wish to call special attention to Dekker; indeed, his little touches upon dress, dinners, bear-baitings, watermen, walks atPowles, Spanish boots, tavern orgies—though largely ironical and much exaggerated doubtless, have the same elements of nature in them which people catch now with their pocket detective cameras. HisSinnes of London, his answer toPierce Pennilesse, hisGull’s Horne Bokeare full of these sketches. This which follows,tells how a young gallant should behave himself in an ordinary:—

“Being arrived in the room, salute not any but those of your acquaintance; walke up and downe by the rest as scornfully and as carelessly as a Gentleman-Usher: Select some friend (having first throwne off your cloake) to walke up and downe the roome with you, … and this will be a meanes to publish your clothes better than Powles, a Tennis-court, or a Playhouse; discourse as lowd as you can, no matter to what purpose if you but make a noise, and laugh in fashion, and have a good sower face to promise quarrelling, you shall be much observed.“If you be a souldier, talke how often you have beene in action: as thePortingalevoiage, Cales voiage, besides some eight or nine imploiments in Ireland.… And if you perceive that the untravellᵈ Company about you take this doune well, ply them with more such stuffe, as how you have interpreted betweene the French king and a great Lord of Barbary, when they have been drinking healthes together, and that will be an excellent occasion to publish your languages, if you have them: if not, get some fragments of French, or smal parcels of Italian, to fling about the table: but beware how you speake any Latine there.”

“If you be a souldier, talke how often you have beene in action: as thePortingalevoiage, Cales voiage, besides some eight or nine imploiments in Ireland.… And if you perceive that the untravellᵈ Company about you take this doune well, ply them with more such stuffe, as how you have interpreted betweene the French king and a great Lord of Barbary, when they have been drinking healthes together, and that will be an excellent occasion to publish your languages, if you have them: if not, get some fragments of French, or smal parcels of Italian, to fling about the table: but beware how you speake any Latine there.”

And he goes on to speak of the three-penny tables and the twelve-penny tables, and of the order in which meats should be eaten—all which as giving glimpses of something like the every-day, actual life of the ambitious and the talked-of young fellowsabout London streets and taverns is better worth to us than Dekker’s dramas.

We encounter next a personage of a different stamp, and one who, very likely, would have shaken his head in sage disapproval of the flippant advices of Dekker; I refer to Michael Drayton,[109]who wrote enormously in verse upon all imaginable subjects; there are elegiacs, canzonets, and fables; there are eclogues, and heroic epistles and legends andNimphidiaand sonnets. He tells of the Barons’ Wars, of the miseries of Queen Margaret, of how David killed Goliath, of Moses in the burning bush—in lines counting by thousands;Paradise Loststretched six times over would not equal his pile of print; and all the verse that Goldsmith ever wrote, compared with Drayton’s portentous mass would seem like an iridescent bit of cockle-shell upon a sea of ink. This protracting writer was a Warwickshire man—not a far-off countryman ofShakespeare, and a year only his senior; a respectable personage, not joining in tavern bouts, caring for himself and living a long life. His great poem ofPoly-olbionmany know by name, and very few, I think, of this generation ever read through. It is about the mountains, rivers, wonders, pleasures, flowers, trees, stories, and antiquities of England; and it is twenty thousand lines long, and every line a long Alexandrine. Yet there are pictures and prettinesses in it, which properly segregated and detached from the wordy trails which go before and after them, would make the fortune of a small poet. There are descriptions in it, valuable for their utter fidelity and a fulness of nomenclature which keeps alive pleasantly ancient names. Here, for instance, is a summing up of old English wild-flowers, where, in his quaint way, he celebrates the nuptials of the river Thames (who is groom) with the bridal Isis, that flows by Oxford towers. It begins at the one hundred and fiftieth line of the fifteenth song of the fiftieth part:—

“The Primrose placing first, because that in the SpringIt is the first appears, then only flourishing;The azuréd Hare-bell next, with them they gently mix’dT’ allay whose luscious smell, they Woodbine plac’d betwixt;Amongst those things of scent, there prick they in the Lily,And near to that again, her sister—DaffodillyTo sort these flowers of show, with th’ other that were so sweet,The Cowslip then they couch, and the Oxlip, for her meet;The Columbine amongst, they sparingly do set,The yellow King-cup wrought in many a curious fret;And now and then among, of Eglantine a spray,By which again a course of Lady-smocks they lay;The Crow-flower, and thereby the Clover-flower they stick,The Daisy over all those sundry sweets so thick.”

“The Primrose placing first, because that in the Spring

It is the first appears, then only flourishing;

The azuréd Hare-bell next, with them they gently mix’d

T’ allay whose luscious smell, they Woodbine plac’d betwixt;

Amongst those things of scent, there prick they in the Lily,

And near to that again, her sister—Daffodilly

To sort these flowers of show, with th’ other that were so sweet,

The Cowslip then they couch, and the Oxlip, for her meet;

The Columbine amongst, they sparingly do set,

The yellow King-cup wrought in many a curious fret;

And now and then among, of Eglantine a spray,

By which again a course of Lady-smocks they lay;

The Crow-flower, and thereby the Clover-flower they stick,

The Daisy over all those sundry sweets so thick.”

The garden-flowers follow in equal fulness of array; and get an even better setting in one of his Nymphals, where they are garlanded about the head of Tita; and in these pretty Nymphals, and still more in the airy, fairyNymphidia—with their elfins and crickets and butterflies, one will get an earlier smack of our own “Culprit Fay.” Those who love the scents of ancient garden-grounds—as we do—will relish the traces of garden love in this old Warwickshire man. In his Heroic Epistles, too, one will find a mastership of ringing couplets: and there are spirit and dash in that clanging battleode of his which sets forth the honors and the daring of Agincourt. Its martial echoes—kept alive by Campbell (“Battle of the Baltic”) and revived again in Tennyson’s “Balaclava,” warrant me in citing two stanzas of the original:—

“Warwick in blood did wade,Oxford the foe invade,And cruel slaughter madeStill as they ran up;Suffolk his axe did ply,Beaumont and WilloughbyBear them right doughtily,Ferrers and Fanhope.“They now to fight are gone;Armour on armour shone,Drum now to drum did groan,To hear, was wonder;That, with the cries they make,The very earth did shake,Trumpet to trumpet spake,Thunder to thunder.”[110]

“Warwick in blood did wade,Oxford the foe invade,And cruel slaughter madeStill as they ran up;Suffolk his axe did ply,Beaumont and WilloughbyBear them right doughtily,Ferrers and Fanhope.

“Warwick in blood did wade,

Oxford the foe invade,

And cruel slaughter made

Still as they ran up;

Suffolk his axe did ply,

Beaumont and Willoughby

Bear them right doughtily,

Ferrers and Fanhope.

“They now to fight are gone;Armour on armour shone,Drum now to drum did groan,To hear, was wonder;That, with the cries they make,The very earth did shake,Trumpet to trumpet spake,Thunder to thunder.”[110]

“They now to fight are gone;

Armour on armour shone,

Drum now to drum did groan,

To hear, was wonder;

That, with the cries they make,

The very earth did shake,

Trumpet to trumpet spake,

Thunder to thunder.”[110]

I now go back to that friend of Drayton’s—Ben Jonson,[111]whom we saw at the closing of the last chapter going into the tavern of the Mermaid. He goes there, or to other like places, very often. He is a friend no doubt of the landlady; he is a friend, too, of all the housemaids, and talks university chaff to them; a friend, too, of all such male frequenters of the house as will listen to him, and will never dispute him; otherwise he is a slang-whanger and a bear.

He was born, as I have said, some years after Shakespeare, but had roared himself into the front ranks before the people of London were thoroughly satisfied that the actor-author of “Richard III.” was a better man than Ben. Very much of gossip with respect to possible jealousies between Shakespeare and Ben Jonson may be found in the clumsy, bundled-up life of the latter by William Gifford.[112]

Jonson was born probably in the west of London—and born poor; but through the favor of some friends went to Westminster School, near to which his step-father, who was a bricklayer, lived: afterward, through similar favor, he went to Cambridge[113]—not staying very long, because called home to help that step-father at his bricklaying. But he did stay long enough to get a thorough taste for learning, and a thorough grounding in it. So he fretted at the bricks, and ran off and enlisted—serving a while in the Low Countries, where poor Philip Sidney met his death, and coming back, a swaggerer, apt with his sword and his speech, into which he had grafted continentalisms; apt at a quarrel, too, and comes to fight a duel, and to kill his man.[114]For this hewent to prison, getting material this way—by hard rubs with the world—for the new work which was ripening in the mind of this actor-author. So, full of all experiences, full of Latin, full of logic, full of history, full of quarrel, full of wine (most whiles) this great, beefy man turned poet. I do not know if you will read—do not think the average reader of to-day will care to study—his dramas. The stories of them are involved, but nicely adjusted as the parts of an intricate machine: you will grow tired, I dare say, of matching part to part; tired of their involutions and evolutions; tired of the puppets in them that keep the machinery going; tired of the passion torn to tatters; tired of the unrest and lack of all repose. Yet there are abounding evidences of wit—of more learning than in Shakespeare, and a great deal drearier; aptnesses of expression, too, which show a keen knowledge of word-meanings and of etymologies; real and deep acquirement manifest, butworn like stiff brocade, or jingling at his pace, like bells upon the heels of a savage. You wonder to find such occasional sense of music with such heavy step—such delicate poise of such gross corporosity.

He helped some hack-writer to put Bacon’s essays into Latin—not that Bacon did not know his Latin; but the great chancellor had not time for the graces of scholastics. Ben wrote an English Grammar, too, which—for its syntax, so far as one may judge from that compend of it which alone remains—is as good as almost any man could invent now. Such learning weighed him down when he put on the buskins, and made the stage tremble with his heaviness. But when he was at play with letters—when he had no plot to contrive and fabricate and foster, and no character to file and finish, and file again, and to fit in with precise order and methodic juxtaposition—when a mad holiday masque—wild as the “Pirates of Penzance”—tempted him to break out into song, his verse is rampant, joyous, exuberant—blithe and dewy as the breath of May-day mornings: See how a littledamsel in the dance of his verse sways and pirouettes—

“As if the wind, not she did walk;Nor pressed a flower, nor bowed a stalk!”

“As if the wind, not she did walk;

Nor pressed a flower, nor bowed a stalk!”

Then, again, in an Epithalamion of hisUnderwoods, as they were called, there is a fragment of verse, which, in many of its delicious couplets, shows the grace and art of Spenser’s wonderful “Epithalamion,” which we read a little time ago:—He is picturing the bridesmaids strewing the bride’s path with flowers:—

“With what full hands, and in how plenteous showersHave they bedewed the earth where she doth tread,As if her airy steps did spring the flowers,And all the ground were garden, where she led.”

“With what full hands, and in how plenteous showers

Have they bedewed the earth where she doth tread,

As if her airy steps did spring the flowers,

And all the ground were garden, where she led.”

Such verses do not come often into our newspaper corners, from first hands: such verses make one understand the significance of that inscription which came by merest accident to be written on his tomb in Westminster Abbey—“O rare Ben Jonson!”

I do not believe I shall fatigue you—and I know I shall keep you in the way of good things if I giveanother fragment from one of his festal operettas;—the “Angel” is describing and symbolizing Truth, in theMasque of Hymen:—

“Upon her head she wears a crown of stars,Thro’ which her orient hair waves to her waist,By which believing mortals hold her fast,And in those golden cords are carried evenTill with her breath she blows them up to Heaven.She wears a robe enchased with eagles’ eyes,To signify her sight in mysteries;Upon each shoulder sits a milk-white dove,And at her feet do witty serpents move;Her spacious arms do reach from East to west,And you may see her heart shine thro’ her breast.Her right hand holds a sun with burning raysHer left, a curious bunch of golden keysWith which Heaven’s gates she locketh and displays.A crystal mirror hangeth at her breast,By which men’s consciences are searched and drest;On her coach-wheels, Hypocrisy lies racked;And squint-eyed Slander with Vain glory backed,Her bright eyes burn to dust, in which shines Fate;An Angel ushers her triumphant gait,Whilst with her fingers fans of stars she twists,And with them beats back Error, clad in mists,Eternal Unity behind her shines,That Fire and Water, Earth and Air combines;Her voice is like a trumpet, loud and shrill,Which bids all sounds in earth and heaven be still.”

“Upon her head she wears a crown of stars,

Thro’ which her orient hair waves to her waist,

By which believing mortals hold her fast,

And in those golden cords are carried even

Till with her breath she blows them up to Heaven.

She wears a robe enchased with eagles’ eyes,

To signify her sight in mysteries;

Upon each shoulder sits a milk-white dove,

And at her feet do witty serpents move;

Her spacious arms do reach from East to west,

And you may see her heart shine thro’ her breast.

Her right hand holds a sun with burning rays

Her left, a curious bunch of golden keys

With which Heaven’s gates she locketh and displays.

A crystal mirror hangeth at her breast,

By which men’s consciences are searched and drest;

On her coach-wheels, Hypocrisy lies racked;

And squint-eyed Slander with Vain glory backed,

Her bright eyes burn to dust, in which shines Fate;

An Angel ushers her triumphant gait,

Whilst with her fingers fans of stars she twists,

And with them beats back Error, clad in mists,

Eternal Unity behind her shines,

That Fire and Water, Earth and Air combines;

Her voice is like a trumpet, loud and shrill,

Which bids all sounds in earth and heaven be still.”

In that line of work Shakespeare never did a better thing than this. Indeed, in those days many, perhaps most, people of learning and culture thought Ben Jonson the better man of the two;—more instructed (as he doubtless was); with a nicer knowledge of the unities; a nicer knowledge of mere conventionalities of all sorts: Shakespeare was a humble, plain Warwickshire man, with no fine tinsel to his wardrobe—had no university training; not so much schooling or science of any sort as Ben Jonson; had come up to London—as would seem—to make his fortune, to get money—to blaze his way: and how he did it!

I suppose a Duchess of Buckingham or any lady of court consequence would have been rather proud of the obeisance of Ben Jonson, after that play of “Every Man in his Humour,” and would have given him a commendatory wave of her fan, much sooner, and more unhesitatingly, than to the Stratford actor, who took the part of Old Knowell in it. Ben believed in conventional laws of speech or of dramatic utterance far more than Shakespeare; he regretted (or perhaps affected to regret whenhis jealousies were sleeping), that Will Shakespeare did not shape his language and his methods with a severer art;[115]he would—very likely—have lashed him, if he had been under him at school, for his irregularities of form and of speech—irregularities that grew out of Shakespeare’s domination of the language, and his will and his power to make it, in all subtlest phases, the servant, and not the master of his thought.

Do I seem, then, to be favoring the breakage of customs, and of the rules of particular grammarians? Yes, unhesitatingly—if you have the mastery to do it as Shakespeare did it; that is, if you have that finer sense of the forces and delicacies of language which will enable you to wrest its periods out of the ruts of every-day traffic, and set them to sonorous roll over the open ground, which is broad as humanity and limitless as thought. Parrotsmust be taught to prate, particle by particle; but the Bob-o-Lincoln swings himself into his great flood of song as no master can teach him to sing.

Even now we do not bid final adieu to Ben Jonson; but hope to encounter him again in the next reign (that of James I.) through the whole of which he carried his noisy literary mastership.

You must not believe, because I have kept mainly by poetic writers in these later days of Queen Elizabeth, that there were no men who wrote prose—none who wrote travels, histories, letters of advice; none who wrote stupid, dull, goodish books; alas, there were plenty of them; there always are.

But there were some to be remembered too: there was William Camden—to whom I have briefly alluded already—and of whom, when you read good histories of this and preceding reigns, you will find frequent mention. He was a learned man, and a kind man, excellent antiquarian, and taught Ben Jonson at Westminster School. Therewas Stow,[116]who wrote aSurvey of London, which he knew from top to bottom. He was born in the centre of it, and as a boy used to fetch milk from a farm at the Minories, to his home in Cornhill, where his father was a tailor. His fulness, his truthfulness, his simplicities, and his quaintness have made his chief book—on London—a much-prized one.

Again there was Hakluyt,[117]who was a church official over in Bristol, and who compiledVoyagesof English seamen which are in every well-appointed library. Dr. Robertson says in hisHistory, “England is more indebted [to Hakluyt] for its American possessions than to any man of that age.” Of so much worth is it to be a good geographer! The “Hakluyt Society” of England will be his enduring monument.

There was also living in those last days of the sixteenth century a strange, conceited, curious travelling man, Thomas Coryat[118]by name, who wenton foot through Europe, and published (in 1611) what he called—with rare and unwitting pertinence—Coryat’s Crudities. He affixed to them complimentary mention of himself—whimseys by the poets, even by so great a man as Ben Jonson—a budget of queer, half-flattering, half-ironical rigmarole, which (having plenty of money) he had procured to be written in his favor; and so ushered his book into the world as something worth large notice. He would have made a capital showman. He had some training at Oxford, and won his way by an inflexible persistence into familiarity with men of rank, who made a butt of him. With a certain gift for language he learned Arabic in some one of his long journeyings, was said to have knowledge of Persian, and made an oration in that speech to the Great Mogul—with nothing but language in it. HisCruditiesare rarely read; but some letters and fragments relating to later travels of his, appear in Purchas’Pilgrims. He lays hold upon peculiarities and littlenesses of life in his workwhich more sensible men would overlook, and which give a certain quaint piquancy to what he told; and we listen, as one might listen to barbers or dressmakers who had just come back from Paris, and would tell us things about cravats and hair-oil and street sights that we could learn no otherwheres. Coryat says:—

“I observe a custom in all those Italian Cities, and tounes thro’ the which I passed, that is not used in any other countrie that I saw—nor do I think that any other nation of Christendom doth use it, but only Italy. The Italian and most other strangers that arecormorantin Italy doe always at their meales use a little forke, when they cut their meate. For while, with their knife which they hold in one hand they cut the meate out of the dish, they fasten the forke which they hold in their other hand upon the same dish, so that whatsoever he be that sitting in the companie of any others at meale, should unadvisidly touch the dish of meate with his fingers from which alle at the table doe cut, he will give occasion of offence unto the company, as having transgressed the laws of good manners.“This forme of feeding is, I understand, common in all places of Italy—their forkes being for the most part made of iron or steele, and some of silver—buttheseare used only by gentlemen.“I myself have thought good to imitate the Italy fashion by this forked cutting of meate not only while I was in Italy, but also in Germany, and oftentimes in England, since I came home.”

“This forme of feeding is, I understand, common in all places of Italy—their forkes being for the most part made of iron or steele, and some of silver—buttheseare used only by gentlemen.

“I myself have thought good to imitate the Italy fashion by this forked cutting of meate not only while I was in Italy, but also in Germany, and oftentimes in England, since I came home.”

Thus we may connect the history of silver forks with Tom Coryat’sCrudities, and with the first reported foot-journeys of an Englishman over the length and breadth of Europe. The wits may have bantered him in Elizabeth’s day; but his journeyings were opened and closed under James.

Again, there were books which had a little of humor, and a little of sentiment, with a great deal of fable, and much advice in them; as a sample of which I may name Mr. Leonard Wright’sDisplaie of Duties, deck’t with sage Sayings, pythie Sentences, and proper Similes: Pleasant to read, delightful to hear, and profitable to practice:[119]By which singularly inviting title we perceive that he had caught the euphuistic ways of Mr. John Lyly. In enumerating the infelicities of a man who marries a shrew, he says:—

“Hee shall find compact in a little flesh a great number of bones too hard to digest. And therefore some doe thinke wedlocke to be that same purgatorie which some learned divines have so long contended about, or a sharpe penance to bring sinful men to Heaven. A merry fellow hearing a preacher saye in his sermon that whosoever would besaved must take up and beare his cross, ran straight to his wife, and castherupon his back.… Finally, he that will live quietly in wedlock must be courteous in speech, cheerful in countenance, provident for his house, careful to traine up his children in virtue, and patient in bearing the infirmities of his wife. Let all the keys hang at her girdle, only the purse at his own. He must also be voide of jealousy, which is a vanity to think, and more folly to suspect. For eyther it needeth not, or booteth not, and to be jealous without a cause is the next way to have a cause.“This is the only way to make a woman dum:To sit and smyle and laugh her out, and not a word butmum!”

“This is the only way to make a woman dum:To sit and smyle and laugh her out, and not a word butmum!”

“This is the only way to make a woman dum:

To sit and smyle and laugh her out, and not a word butmum!”

Quite another style of man was Philip Stubbes,[120]a Puritan reformer—not to be confounded with John Stubbes who had his right hand cut off, by order of the Queen, for writing against the impropriety and villainy of her prospective marriage with a foreign prince—but a kinsman of his, who wrote wrathily against masques and theatre-going; whipping with his pen all those roystering poets who made dramas or madrigals, all the fine-dressed gallants, and all the fans and ruffs of the women as so many weapons of Satan.

“One arch or piller,” says he, “wherewith the Devil’s kingdome of great ruffes is under propped, is a certain kind of liquid matter which they callstarch, wherein the Devil hath learned them to wash and die their ruffes, which, being drie, will stand stiff and inflexible about their neckes.”

And he tells a horrific story—as if it were true—about an unfortunate wicked lady, who being invited to a wedding could not get her ruff stiffened and plaited as she wanted; so fell to swearing and tearing, and vowed “that the Devil might have her whenever she woreneckerchersagain.” And the Evil One took her at her word, appearing in the guise of a presentable young man who arranged her ruffs

“—to her so great contentation and liking, that she became enamored with him. The young man kissed her, in the doing whereof he writhed her neck in sunder, so she died miserably; her body being straightwaies changed into blue and black colors, most ugglesome to behold, and her face most deformed and fearful to look upon. This being known in the city great preparation was made for her burial, and a rich coffin was provided, and her fearful body was laid therein. Four men assay’d to lift up the corps, but could not move it. Whereat the standers-by—marvelling causing the coffin to be opened to see the cause thereof, found the body to be taken away, and a blacke catte, very leane and deformed, sitting in the coffin, settingof great ruffes, and frizzling of haire, to the great feare and wonder of all the beholders.”

We do not preach in just that way against fashionable dressing in our time.

A book on theArte of English Poesiebelongs to those days—supposed to be the work of George Puttenham[121]—written for the “recreation and service” of the Queen; it has much good counsel in it—specially in its latter part; and the author says he wrote it to “help the gentlewomen of the Court to write good Poetry.” As an exampler, under his discussion of “Ornament,” he cites what he graciously calls a “sweet and sententious ditty” from the Queen’s own hand. The reader will be curious perhaps to see some portion of this:—

“The doubt of future foes, exiles my present joy,And wit me warnes to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy,For falsehood now doth flow, and subject faith doth ebbe,Which would not be, if reason rul’d, or wisdome wev’d the webbe.”

“The doubt of future foes, exiles my present joy,

And wit me warnes to shun such snares as threaten mine annoy,

For falsehood now doth flow, and subject faith doth ebbe,

Which would not be, if reason rul’d, or wisdome wev’d the webbe.”

This much will serve for our republican delectation; but it is not the only instance in which we find mention of her Majesty’s dalliance with verse: In an old book called theGarden of the Muses, of the date of 1600, the author says the flowers are gathered out of many excellent speeches spoken to her Majesty at triumphs, masques, and shows, as also out of divers choice ditties sung to her; and “some especially proceeding from her own most sacred selfe.” No one of them, however, would have ranked her with any of the poets of whom we have made particular mention; but for fine, clear, nervous, masculine English, to put into a letter, or into a despatch, or into a closet scolding, I suspect she would have held rank with any of them.

If not a poet, she led poets into gracious ways of speech. Her culture, her clear perceptions, her love of pageants even, her intolerance of all forms of dulness or slowness, her very vanities—were all of them stimulants to those who could put glowing thought into musical language. Her high ruff, her jewelled corsage, her flashing eye, her swift impulses, her perils, her triumphs, heraudacities, her maidenhood—all drew flatteries that heaped themselves in songs and sonnets. So live a woman and so live a Queen magnetized dulness into speech.

I spoke but now of her love of pageants; every visiting prince from every great neighbor kingdom was honored with a pageant; every foreign suitor to her maidenly graces—whether looked on with favor or disfavor (as to which her eye and lip told no tales)—brought gala-days to London streets—brought revels, and bear-baitings, and high passages of arms, and swaying of pennons and welcoming odes. Many and many a time the roystering poets I named to you—the Greenes, the Marlowes, the Jonsons, the Peeles, may have looked out from the Mermaid Tavern windows upon the royal processions that swept with gold-cloth, and crimson housings through Cheapside, where every house blazed with welcoming banners, and every casement was crowded with the faces of the onlookers.

Thereby, too, she would very likely have passed in her famous “Progresses” to her good friends in the eastern counties; or to her loved Lord Burleigh, or to Cecil, at their fine place of Theobalds’ Park,[122]near Waltham Cross. True, old Burleigh was wont to complain that her Majesty made him frequent visits, and that every one cost him a matter of two or three thousand pounds. Indeed it was no small affair to take in the Queen with her attendants. Hospitable people of our day are sometimes taken aback by an easy-going friend who comes suddenly on a visit with a wife, and four or five children, and Saratoga trunks, and two or three nursery-maids, and a few poodles and a fox-terrier; but think of the Queen, with her tiring-women, and her ladies of the chamber, and her ushers, and her grand falconer, and her master of the hounds, and her flesher—who knows the cuts she likes—and her cook, and her secretary, and her fifty yeomen of the guard, and her sumpter mules, and her chaplain, and her laundry-women, and her fine-starchers!No wonder Lord Burleigh groaned when he received a little notelet from his dear Queen saying she was coming down upon him—for a week or ten days.

And Elizabeth loved these little surprises overmuch, and the progress along the high roads thither and back, which so fed her vanities: She was a woman of thrift withal, and loved her savings; and the kitchen fires at Nonsuch palace, or at Greenwich or at Richmond, might go out for a time while she was away upon these junketings.

I know that my young readers will be snuggling in their minds a memory of that greatest Progress of hers, and that grandest of all private entertainments—at Kenilworth Castle; wondering, maybe, if that charming, yet over-sad story of Walter Scott’s is true to the very life? And inasmuch as they will be devouring that book, I suspect, a great deal oftener than they will read Laneham’s account of the great entertainment, or Gascoigne’s,[123]I willtell them how much, and where it varies from the true record. Therewasa Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester—a brilliant man, elegant in speech, in person, in manner—at a court where his nephew Philip Sidney had shone—altogether such a courtier as Scott has painted him: And the Queen had regarded him tenderly—so tenderly that it became the talk of her household and of the world. It is certain, too, that Leicester gave to the Queen a magnificent entertainment at his princely castle of Kenilworth, in the month of July, 1575. There were giants, there were Tritons, there were floating islands. Lawns were turned into lakes, and lakes were bridged with huge structures, roofed with crimson canopies, where fairies greeted the great guest with cornucopias of flowers and fruits. There was fairy music too; there were dances and plays and fireworks, that lighted all the region round about with a blaze of burning darts, and streams and hail of fire-sparks.

In all this there is no exaggeration in Scott’spicturing; none either in his portraiture of the coquetries and princely graces of the Queen. It is probable that no juster and truer picture of her aspect and bearing, and of the more salient points of her character ever will or can be drawn.

Thither, too, had come—from all the country round—yeomen, strolling players, adventurous youths, quick to look admiringly after that brilliant type of knighthood Sir Philip Sidney, then in his twenty-first year, and showing his gay trappings in the royal retinue: amongst such youths were, very likely, Michael Drayton and William Shakespeare, boys both in that day, just turned of eleven, and making light of the ten or twelve miles of open and beautiful country which lay between Kenilworth and their homes of Atherstone and of Stratford-upon-Avon.

It is true too, that Leicester, so admired of the Queen, and who was her host, had once married an Amy Robsart: true, too, that this Amy Robsart had died in a strangely sudden way at an old manor-house of Cumnor; and true that a certain Foster and Varney, who were dependants of Leicester, did in some sense have her in their keeping. But—andhere the divergence from history begins—this poor Amy Robsart had been married to Sir Robert Dudley before he came to the title of Leicester, and she died in the mysterious way alluded to, some fifteen years before these revels of Kenilworth: but not before Elizabeth had been attracted by the proud and noble bearing of Robert Dudley. Her fondness for him began about the year 1559. And it was this early fondness of hers which gave color to the story that he had secretly caused the death of Amy Robsart. The real truth will probably never be known: there was a public inquiry (not so full, he said, as he could have wished) which acquitted Leicester; but his character was such that he never outlived suspicion. I observe that Mr. Motley, in hisHistory of the United Netherlands, on the faith of a paper in the Record Office, avers Leicester’s innocence; but the tenor of a life counts for more than one justifying document in measuring a man’s moral make-up.

In the year 1575, when the revels of Kenilworth occurred, the Earl of Leicester was a widower and Amy Robsart had been ten years mouldering in her grave: but in the year 1576 the young Countess ofEssex suddenly became a widow, and was married privately, very shortly afterward, to the Earl of Leicester. In the next year, 1577, the story was blazed abroad, and the Queen showed her appreciation of the sudden match by sending Leicester straight to the Tower. But she forgave him presently. And out of these scattered actualities, as regards the Earl, Sir Walter Scott has embroidered his delightful romance.

But we have already brought our literary mention up to a point far beyond this in the Queen’s life; up to a point where Shakespeare, instead of tearing over hedge-rows and meadows to see the Tritons and the harlequins of Kenilworth, has put his own Tritons to swimming in limpid verse, and has put his bloated, dying Falstaff to “babbling o’ green fields.” The Queen, too, who has listened—besides these revels—to the tender music of Spenser and outlived him; who has heard the gracious courtliness of Sidney, and outlived him; who has lent a willing ear to the young flatteries of Raleigh and seen him ripen into a gray-haired adventurer of the seas; who has watched the future Lord Keeper, Francis Bacon, as he has shotup from boyhood into the stateliness of middle age; who has seen the worshipful Master John Lyly grow up, and chant his euphuism and sing his songs and die: she too, now, is feeling the years—brilliant as they may be in achievement—count and weigh upon her.

Long as she could, she cherished all the illusions of youth. That poor old face of hers was, I suspect, whited and reddened with other pigments than what the blood made, as the years went by. Such out-of-door sports as bear-baiting became rarer and rarer with her; and she loved better such fun as the fat Falstaff made, in her theatre of Whitehall. But only nicest observers saw the change; and she never admitted it—perhaps not to herself.

The gossiping Paul Hentzner, who had an ambassador’s chances of observation, says of her, on her way to chapel at Greenwich:—

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