in the reason which he assigned for it; but he might have found a more valid one. Poetry never can become popular unless it be perspicuous, and these long Latinisms were unintelligible to the people. The ornate style has been tried in most modern languages, and fallen wherever it has been tried, first into ridicule, and then into disuse.

VII. From Chaucer to the days of Henry VIII, no progress was made in literature; in those days it could not flourish without patronage, and the men of rank who should have patronized it perished by the sword, or by the axe. Lydgate and Barclay did nothing but contribute largely to the quantity of English verse; but it must be remembered that this was doing much. No improvement was made, no innovation attempted; the several species of poetry in use continued, without alteration, being either such as were common to all countries, and borrowed from the French, or dull moral ballads, virelays, and roundelays, perhaps borrowed from the Spaniards. Under Henry VIII, it is wonderful to behold the progress of fine

literature, amidst an age of theological controversy and incessant persecution. As to the necessity and propriety of intolerance both parties were agreed, and it would be difficult to say which was the most sincere in its bloody practice. But those accursed opinions, which represent the Creator as a malignant principle, and by a consistent system of morals and of worship tend to deaden and debase the human intellect, had not yet gained ground; and Literature, by the first controversies of the Reformation, gained. more than it lost. Poetry, however, owes less to it than Prose. Skelton, in his strange style, first attacked the Reformers, and then aided them; the Church of Rome was ridiculed in mysteries and songs, and the school of Sternhold and Hopkins was established a school in which the succession of masters has been uninterrupted; the fanaticks of our own days being as much edified as the Psalm-singers of King Edward's, with godly songs, and the sorrowful sobs of simple sinners. Poetry gained nothing by these efforts, but happily it lost nothing. In Scotland, where fanaticism even

tually triumphed, the fine arts were extirpated; John Knox was the Hebert of the Reformation.

During this reign the Italian forms of poetry were introduced by Wyatt and Surry; blankverse was invented; Tragedy and Comedy were brought to a regular shape; and the Mirror of Magistrates led the way to our historical dramas. The reign of Mary checked all these buddings, like an East-wind in May; but under Elizabeth they burst into full blossom with the sudden luxuriance of an Arctick summer.

VIII. There is here no room to speak of the great Poets of Elizabeth's age; let it suffice to mention Spenser, whom none of the chivalrous Poets have surpassed, and Shakspeare, who remains, and perhaps is for ever to remain, unequalled. Experiments in versification were made more generally than they have been' in any subsequent times. Sidney's scheme of introducing the Roman metres has been often ridiculed; they however who ridicule the failure of this attempt have not considered its cause. He, and his associates, proceeded apoa the are

practicable project of reducing the English language to the rules of Latin prosody; which was nothing less than changing the national system of pronunciation. That many classical metres, and the hexameter in particular, may advantageously be naturalized, if accent be substituted for quantity, I am perfectly convinced; Goldsmith was of the same opinion, and the fact has been proved in Germany. The experiments in the Arcadia, the Drama and Eclogues of Abraham Fraunce, and above all the four books of the Æneid by Stanihurst, could excite nothing but wonder, ridicule, and disgust, and accordingly the scheme seems to have died away with its great patron-a man of whom, mistaken as he was in this single instance, it is not possible to speak in terms of higher admiration, than his great and various excellencies deserve.

The ten syllable couplet was now generally. rejected in narrative. Stanzas were either adopted in its place, as by Daniel; by Drayton in his Barons' Wars, and by Spenser, the great master of English versification; the long

ballad line of fourteen syllables, as by Warner and by most of the translators; or the Alexandrine, as in the Polyolbion. Chalkhill's Fragment, and the Odyssey of Chapman, are the only instances of the common measure which I recollect.

The poetry of this, our golden age, is usually said to have been formed upon the Italian school. Sonnets, it is true, swarmed; but there is little other reason for the assertion, for romance and allegory did not originate in Italy, and the Faëry Queen therefore is not of the Italian school; but of the same school as the Italians. Never, in any age, was the li terary intercourse of Europe so rapid as in this; whatever works of real value appeared in France or Italy, Spain or Portugal, were immediately made our own, whether prose or verse, history or travels, science, or the miscellanies of omnifarious scraps which abounded in every country, and contained so much. knowledge with so much errour. The industry of our good old translators, (let me not be understood as using the epithet good contemp