CHAPTER II. REVIVAL OF LEARNING. 1450-1558. M. SISMONDI, in his admirable work on the Literature of the South of Europe, has a passage,1 explaining the decline of Italian literature in the fifteenth century, which is so strictly applicable to the corresponding decline of English literature for a hundred and seventy years after Chaucer, that we cannot forbear quoting it : The century which, after the death of Petrarch, had been devoted by the Italians to the study of antiquity, during which literature experienced no advance, and the Italian language seemed to retrograde, was not, however, lost to the powers of imagination. Poetry, on its first revival, had not received sufficient nourishment. The fund of knowledge, of ideas, and of images, which she called to her aid, was too restricted. The three great men of the fourteenth century, whom we first presented to the attention of the reader, had, by the sole force of their genius, attained a degree of erudition, and a sublimity of thought, far beyond the spirit of their age. These qualities were entirely personal; and the rest of the Italian bards, like the Provençal poets, were reduced, by the poverty of their ideas, to have recourse to those continual attempts at wit, and to that mixture of unintelligible ideas and incoherent images, which render the perusal of ■ Vol. ii. p. 400 (Roscoe). them so fatiguing. The whole of the fifteenth century was employed in extending in every direction the knowledge and resources of the friends of the Muses. Antiquity was unveiled to them in all its elevated characters-its severe laws, its energetic virtue, and its beautiful and engaging mythology; in its subtle and profound philosophy, its overpowering eloquence, and its delightful poetry. Another age was required to knead afresh the clay for the formation of a nobler race. At the close of the century, a finished statue, and it started divine breath animated the into life.' Mutatis mutandis, these eloquent sentences are exactly applicable to the case of English literature. Chaucer's eminence was purely personal; even more so, perhaps, than that of the great Italians, for the countrymen of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio at least possessed a settled and beautiful language, adapted already to nearly all literary purposes; while the tongue of Chaucer was in so rude and unformed a condition that only transcendent genius could make a work expressed through it endurable. The fifteenth century seems to have been an age of active preparation in every country of Europe. Though no great books were produced in it, it witnessed the invention of the art of printing, the effect of which was so to multiply copies of the masterpieces of Greek and Roman genius, to reduce their price, and to enlarge the circle of their readers, as to supply abundantly new materials for thought, and new models of artistic form, and thus pave the way for the great writers of the close of the next century. Printing, invented at Metz by Gutenberg about the year 1450, was introduced into England by William Caxton in 1474. The zealous patronage of two enlightened noblemen, Lord Worcester and Lord Rivers, greatly aided him in his enterprise. This century was also signalised by the foundation of many schools and colleges, in which the founders desired that the recovered learning of an tiquity should be uninterruptedly and effectually cultivated. Eton, the greatest of the English schools, and King's College at Cambridge, were founded by Henry VI. between 1440 and 1450. Three new universities arose in Scotland -that of St. Andrew's in 1410, of Glasgow in 1450, of Aberdeen in 1494;-all under the express authority of different Popes. Three or four unsuccessful attempts were made in the course of this and the previous century,the latest in 1496-to establish a.university in Dublin. Several colleges were founded at Oxford and Cambridge in the reign of Henry VIII., among which we may specify Christ Church, the largest college at the former university, which, however, was originally planned by the magnificent Wolsey on a far larger scale, and the noble foundation of Trinity College, Cambridge. 6 In the period now before us our attention will be directed to three subjects;-the poets, whether English or Scotch, the state and progress of learning,—and the prose writers. The manner in which the great and complex movement of the Reformation influenced for good or evil the development of literature, is too wide a subject to be fully considered here. Something, however, will be said under this head, when we come to sketch the rise of the 'new learning,' or study of the Humanities, in England, and inquire into the causes of its fitful and intermittent growth. Poetry:-Hardyng, Hawes, Skelton, Surrey, Wyat; firstPoet Laureate. The poets of this period, at least on the English side of the border, were of small account. The middle of the fifteenth century witnessed the expulsion of the English from France; and a time of national humiliation is unfavourable to the production of poetry. If, indeed, humiliation become permanent, and involve subjection to the stranger, the plaintive wailings of the elegiac Muse are naturally evoked; as we see in the instances of Ireland and Wales. But where a nation is merely disgraced, not crushed, it keeps silence, and waits for a better day. For more than thirty years after the loss of the French provinces, England was distracted and weakened by the civil wars of the Roses. This was also a time unfavourable to poetry, the makers of which then and long afterwards depended on the patronage of the noble and wealthy,-a patronage which, in that time of fierce passions, alternate suffering, and universal disquietude, was not likely to be steadily maintained. Why the fifty years which followed the victory of Bosworth should have been so utterly barren of good poetry, it is less easy to see. All that can be said is, that this was an age of preparation, in which men disentombed and learned to appreciate old treasures, judging that they were much better employed than in attempting to produce new matter, with imperfect means and models. Towards the close of the reign of Henry VIII. were produced the Songs and Sonnettes of the friends Lord Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyat; and Sackville wrote the Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates in the last year of Mary. Scotland seems to have been about a century later than England in arriving at the stage of literary culture which Chaucer and his contemporaries illustrate. Several poets of no mean order arose in that country during the period now in question. Of some of these, namely, Dunbar, Gawain Douglas, Lyndsay, and Henryson, we shall presently have to make particular mention. John Hardyng was in early life an esquire to Harry Percy, commonly called Hotspur. After seeing his lord fall on the field of Shrewsbury, he took service with Sir Robert Umfravile, and remained till his death a dependent on that family. He wrote-in that common seven-line stanza which we have called the 'Chaucerian heptastich'—a Chronicle of Britain, which comes down to 1462, ending with an address to Edward IV. urging .him to be merciful to the Lancastrians, and to make just allowance for previous circumstances. H Stephen Hawes, groom of the chamber to Henry VII., wrote, among other poems, the Pastime of Pleasure, a narrative allegory like the Romance of the Rose, the Vision of Piers Plowman, and so many other favourite poems of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This work is in the seven-line stanza so much employed by Chaucer. The versification has little of the smoothness and music of the great master; it is rough and untunable, like that of Lydgate. Hawes must have died after the year 1509, since we have among his poems a Coronation ode celebrating the accession of Henry VIII. John Skelton, a secular priest, studied at both universities, and had a high reputation for scholarship in the early part of the sixteenth century. It is certain that his Latin verses are much superior to his serious attempts in English. A long rambling elegy in the seven-line stanza on Henry, fourth Earl of Northumberland, murdered in 1489, will be found in Percy. The versification is even worse than that of Hawes. In Skelton's satires there is a naturalness and a humour, which make them still readable. Two of these, entitled Speke, Parrot, and Why come ye not to Court, contain vigorous but coarse attacks on Cardinal Wolsey, to escape from whose wrath Skelton had to take sanctuary at Westminster, and afterwards was protected by Bishop Islip till his death in 1529. He is particularly fond of short six-syllable lines, which some have named from him 'Skeltonical verse.' Here is a short specimen, taken from Phyllyp Sparowe, a strange rambling elegy upon a favourite sparrow, belonging to a nun, which had been killed by a cat: O cat of carlyshe kinde, The fynde was in thy mynde The lyons in theyr rage, |