CHAPTER XXIV.

HISTORY OF POLITE LITERATURE IN PROSE PROM 1600 TO 1650.

SECT. I.

_Italian Writers--Boccalini--Grammatical and Critical Works--Gracian-- French Writers--Balzac--Voiture--French Academy--Vaugelas--Patru and Le Maistre--Style of English Prose--Earl of Essex--Knolles--Several other English Writers_.

|Decline of taste in Italy.|

1. It would be vain, probably, to inquire from what general causes we should deduce the decline of taste in Italy. None, at least, have occurred to my mind, relating to political or social circumstances, upon which we could build more than one of those sophistical theories, which assume a causal relation between any concomitant events. Bad taste, in fact, whether in literature or the arts, is always ready to seize upon the public, being, in many cases, no more than a pleasure in faults which are really fitted to please us, and of which it can only be said that they hinder or impair the greater pleasure we should derive from beauties. Among these critical sins, none are so dangerous as the display of ingenious and novel thoughts, or turns of phrase. For as such enter into the definition of good writing, it seems very difficult to persuade the world that they can ever be the characteristics of bad writing. The metes and bounds of ornament, the fine shades of distinction which regulate a judicious choice, are only learned by an attentive as well as a naturally susceptible mind; and it is rarely, perhaps, that an unprepared multitude does not prefer the worse picture, the worse building, the worse poem, the worse speech to the better. Education, an acquaintance with just criticism, and still more the habitual observation of what is truly beautiful in nature or art, or in the literature of taste, will sometimes generate almost a national tact that rejects the temptations of a meretricious and false style; but experience has shown that this happy state of public feeling will not be very durable. Whatever might be the cause of it, this age of the Italian seicentisti has been reckoned almost as inauspicious to good writing in prose as in verse. “If we except,” says Tiraboschi, “the Tuscans and a very few more, never was our language so neglected as in this period. We can scarce bear to read most of the books that were published, so rude and full of barbarisms is their style. Few had any other aim than to exercise their wit in conceits and metaphors; and, so long as they could scatter them profusely over their pages, cared nothing for the choice of phrases or the purity of grammar. Their eloquence on public occasions was intended only for admiration and applause, not to persuade, or move.”[554] And this, he says, is applicable alike to their Latin and Italian, their sacred and profane harangues. The academical discourses, of which Dati has collected many in his Prose Fiorentine, are poor in comparison with those of the sixteenth.[555]

[554] Vol. xi., p. 415.

[555] Vol. xi., p. 415.

2. A later writer than Tiraboschi has thought this sentence against the seicentisti a little too severe, and condemning equally with him the bad taste characteristic of that age, endeavours to rescue a few from the general censure.[556] It is, at least, certain that the insipidity of the cinque cento writers, their long periods void of any but the most trivial meaning, their affectation of the faults of Cicero’s manner in their own language, ought not to be overlooked or wholly pardoned, while we dwell on an opposite defect of their successors, the perpetual desire to be novel, brilliant, or profound. These may, doubtless, be the more offensive of the two; but they are, perhaps, not less likely to be mingled with something really worth reading.

[556] Salfi, xiv., 11.

|Style of Galileo.|

3. It will not be expected that we can mention many Italian books, after what has been said, which come very precisely within the class of polite literature, or claim any praise on the ground of style. Their greatest luminary, Galileo, wrote with clearness, elegance, and spirit; no one among the moderns had so entirely rejected a dry and technical manner of teaching, and thrown such attractions round the form of truth. Himself a poet and a critic, he did not hesitate to ascribe his own philosophical perspicuity to the constant perusal of Ariosto. This I have mentioned in another place; but we cannot too much remember that all objects of intellectual pursuit are as bodies acting with reciprocal forces in one system, being all in relation to the faculties of the mind, which is itself but one; and that the most extensive acquaintance with the various provinces of literature will not fail to strengthen our dominion over those we more peculiarly deem our own. The school of Galileo, especially Torricelli and Redi, were not less distinguished than himself for their union of elegance with philosophy.[557]

[557] Salfi, xiv., 12.

|Bentivoglio.|

4. The letters of Bentivoglio are commonly known. This epistolary art was always cultivated by the Italians, first in the Latin tongue, and afterwards in their own. Bentivoglio has written with equal dignity and ease. Galileo’s letters are also esteemed on account of their style as well as of what they contain. In what is more peculiarly called eloquence, the Italians of this age are rather emulous of success than successful; the common defects of taste in themselves, and in those who heard or read them, as well as, in most instances, the uninteresting nature of their subjects exclude them from our notice.

|Boccalini’s News from Parnassus.|

5. Trajan Boccalini was by his disposition inclined to political satire, and possibly to political intrigue; but we have here only to mention the work by which he is best known, Advices from Parnassus (Ragguagli di Parnaso). If the idea of this once popular and celebrated book is not original, which I should rather doubt, though without immediately recognising a similarity to anything earlier (Lucian, the common prototype, excepted), it has at least been an original source. In the general turn of Boccalini’s fictions, and perhaps in a few particular inventions, we may sometimes perceive what a much greater man has imitated; they bear a certain resemblance to those of Addison, though the vast superiority of the latter in felicity of execution and variety of invention may almost conceal it. The Ragguagli are a series of despatches from the court of Apollo on Parnassus, where he is surrounded by eminent men of all ages. This fiction becomes in itself very cold and monotonous; yet there is much variety in the subjects of the decisions made by the god, with the advice of his counsellors, and some strokes of satire are well hit, though more perhaps fail of effect. But we cannot now catch the force of every passage. Boccalini is full of allusions to his own time, even where the immediate subject seems ancient. This book was published at Venice in 1612; at a time when the ambition of Spain was regarded with jealousy by patriotic Italians, who thought that pacific republic their bulwark and their glory. He inveighs, therefore, against the military spirit and the profession of war, “necessary sometimes, but so fierce and inhuman that no fine expressions can make it honourable.”[558] Nor is he less severe on the vices of kings, nor less ardent in his eulogies of liberty; the government of Venice, being reckoned, and not altogether untruly, an asylum of free-thought and action, in comparison with that of Spain. Aristotle, he reports in one of his despatches, was besieged in his villa on Parnassus by a number of armed men belonging to different princes, who insisted on his retracting the definition he had given of a tyrant, that he was one who governed for his own good and not that of the people, because it would apply to every prince, all reigning for their own good. The philosopher, alarmed by this demand, altered his definition; which was to run thus, that tyrants were certain persons of old time, whose race was now quite extinct.[559] Boccalini, however, takes care, in general, to mix something of playfulness with his satire, so that it could not be resented without apparent ill-nature. It seems, indeed, to us free from invective, and rather meant to sting than to wound. But this, if a common rumour be true, did not secure him against a beating of which he died. The style of Boccalini is said by the critics to be clear and fluent, rather than correct or elegant; and he displays the taste of his times by extravagant metaphors. But to foreigners, who regard this less, his News from Parnassus, unequal, of course, and occasionally tedious, must appear to contain many ingenious allusions, judicious criticisms, and acute remarks.

[558] Ragg, 75.

[559] Ragg, 76.

|His Pietra del Paragone.|

6. The Pietra del Paragone by the same author is an odd, and rather awkward mixture of reality and fiction, all levelled at the court of Spain, and designed to keep alive a jealousy of its ambition. It is a kind of episode or supplement to the Ragguagli di Parnaso, the leading invention being preserved. Boccalini is an interesting writer on account of the light he throws on the history and sentiments of Italy. He is in this work a still bolder writer than in the former; not only censuring Spain without mercy, but even the Venetian aristocracy, observing upon the insolence of the young nobles towards the citizens, though he justifies the senate for not punishing the former more frequently with death by public execution, which would lower the nobility in the eyes of the people. They were, however, he says, as severely punished, when their conduct was bad, by exclusion from offices of trust. The Pietra del Paragone is a kind of political, as the Ragguagli is a critical miscellany.

|Ferrante Pallavicino.|

7. About twenty years after Boccalini, a young man appeared, by name Ferrante Pallavicino, who, with a fame more local and transitory, with less respectability of character, and probably with inferior talents, trod to a certain degree in his steps. As Spain had been the object of satire to the one, so was Rome to the other. Urban VIII., an ambitious pontiff, and vulnerable in several respects, was attacked by an imprudent and self-confident enemy, safe, as he imagined, under the shield of Venice. But Pallavicino, having been trepanned into the power of the pope, lost his head at Avignon. None of his writings have fallen in my way; that most celebrated at the time, and not wholly dissimilar in the conception to the News from Parnassus, was entitled The Courier robbed; a series of imaginary letters which such a fiction gave him a pretext for bringing together. Perhaps we may consider Pallavicino as rather a counterpart to Jordano Bruno, in the satirical character of the latter, than to Boccalini.[560]

[560] Corniani, viii., 205. Salfi, xiv., 46.

|Dictionary Della Crusca.|

8. The Italian language itself, grammatically considered, was still assiduously cultivated. The Academicians of Florence published the first edition of their celebrated Vocabolario della Crusca, in 1613. It was avowedly founded on Tuscan principles, setting up the fourteenth century as the Augustan period of the language, which they disdained to call Italian; and though not absolutely excluding the great writers of the sixteenth age whom Tuscany had not produced, giving in general a manifest preference to their own. Italy has rebelled against this tyranny of Florence, as she did, in the Social War, against that of Rome. Her Lombard, and Romagnol, and Neapolitan writers, have claimed the rights of equal citizenship, and fairly won them in the field of literature. The Vocabulary itself was not received as a legislative code. Beni assailed it by his Anti-Crusca the same year; many invidiously published marginal notes to point out the inaccuracies; and in the frequent revisions and enlargements of this dictionary, the exclusive character it affected has, I believe, been nearly lost.

|Grammatical works.--Buonmattei Bartoli.|

9. Buonmattei, himself a Florentine, was the first who completed an extensive and methodical grammar, “developing,” says Tiraboschi, “the whole economy and system of our language.” It was published entire, after some previous impressions of parts, with the title, Della Lingua Toscana, in 1643. This has been reckoned a standard work, both for its authority, and for the clearness, precision, and elegance with which it is written; but it betrays something of an academical and Florentine spirit in the rigour of its grammatical criticism.[561] Bartoli, a Ferrarese Jesuit, and a man of extensive learning, attacked that dogmatic school, who were accustomed to proscribe common phrases with a Non si può (It cannot be used), in a treatise entitled Il torto ed il diritto del Non si può. His object was to justify many expressions thus authoritatively condemned, by the examples of the best writers. This book was a little later than the middle of the century.[562]

[561] Tiraboschi, xi., 409. Salfi, xiii., 398.

[562] Corniani, vii., 259. Salfi, xiii., 417.

|Tassoni’s remarks on Petrarch.|

10. Petrarch had been the idol, in general, of the preceding age; and above all, he was the peculiar divinity of the Florentines. But this seventeenth century was in the productions of the mind a period of revolutionary innovation; men dared to ask why, as well as what, they ought to worship; and sometimes the same who rebelled against Aristotle, as an infallible guide, were equally contumacious in dealing with the great names of literature. Tassoni published in 1609 his Observations on the Poems of Petrarch. They are not written, as we should now think, adversely to one whom he professes to honour above all lyric poets in the world, and though his critical remarks are somewhat minute, they seem hardly unfair. A writer like Petrarch, whose fame has been raised so high by his style, is surely amenable to this severity of examination. The finest sonnets Tassoni generally extols, but gives a preference, on the whole, to the odes; which, even if an erroneous judgment, cannot be called unfair upon the author of both.[563] He produces many parallel passages from the Latin poems of Petrarch himself, as well as from the ancients and from the earlier Italians and Provençals. The manner of Tassoni is often humorous, original, intrepid, satirical on his own times; he was a man of real taste, and no servile worshipper of names.

[563] Tutte le rime, tutti i versi in generale del Petrarca lo fecero poeta; ma le canzoni, per quanto a mi ne pare, furono quelle, che poeta grande e famoso lo fecero, p. 46.

|Galileo’s remarks on Tasso.|

|Sforza Pallavicino.|

|And other critical writers.|

11. Galileo was less just in his observations upon Tasso. They are written with severity and sometimes an insulting tone towards the great poet, passing over generally the most beautiful verses, though he sometimes bestows praise. The object is to point out the imitations of Tasso from Ariosto, and his general inferiority. The Observations on the Art of Writing by Sforza Pallavicino, the historian of the council of Trent, published at Rome, 1646, is a work of general criticism containing many good remarks. What he says of imitation is worthy of being compared with Hurd; though he will be found not to have analysed the subject with anything like so much acuteness, nor was this to be expected in his age. Pallavicino has an ingenious remark, that elegance of style is produced by short metaphors, or _metaforette_ as he calls them, which give us a more lively apprehension of an object than its proper name. This seems to mean only single words in a figurative sense, as opposed to phrases of the same kind. He writes in a pleasing manner, and is an accomplished critic without pedantry. Salfi has given rather a long analysis of this treatise.[564] The same writer, treading in the steps of Corniani has extolled some Italian critics of this period, whose writings I have never seen; Beni, author of a prolix commentary in Latin on the poetics of Aristotle; Peregrino, not inferior, perhaps, to Pallavicino, though less known, whose theories are just and deep, but not expressed with sufficient perspicuity; and Fioretti, who assumed the fictitious name of Udeno Nisieli, and presided over an academy at Florence denominated the Apatisti. The Progymnasmi Poetici of this writer, if we may believe Salfi, ascend to that higher theory of criticism which deduces its rules, not from precedents or arbitrary laws, but from the nature of the human mind, and has, in modern times, been distinguished by the name of æsthetic.[565]

[564] Vol. xiii., p. 440.

[565] Corniani, vii., 156; Salfi, xiii., 426.

|Prolusiones of Strada.|

12. In the same class of polite letters as these Italian writings, we may place the Prolusiones Academicæ of Famianus Strada. They are agreeably written, and bespeak a cultivated taste. The best is the sixth of the second book, containing the imitations of six Latin poets, which Addison has made well known (as I hope) to every reader in the 115th and 119th numbers of the Guardian. It is here that all may judge of this happy and graceful fiction; but those who have read the Latin imitations themselves, will perceive that Strada has often caught the tone of the ancients with considerable felicity. Lucan and Ovid are, perhaps, best counterfeited, Virgil not quite so well, and Lucretius worst of the six. The other two are Statius and Claudian.[566] In almost every instance the subject chosen is appropriated to the characteristic peculiarities of the poet.

[566] A writer quoted in Blount’s Censura Autorum, p. 859, praises the imitation of Claudian above the rest, but thinks all excellent.

|Spanish prose. Gracian.|

13. The style of Gongora which deformed the poetry of Spain extended its influence over prose. A writer named Gracian (it seems to be doubtful which of two brothers, Lorenzo and Balthazar) excelled Gongora himself in the affectation, the refinement, the obscurity of his style. “The most voluminous of his works,” says Bouterwek, “bears the affected title of El Criticón. It is an allegorical picture of the whole course of human life divided into Crises, that is, sections according to fixed points of view, and clothed in the formal garb of a pompous romance. It is scarcely possible to open any page of this book without recognising in the author a man who is in many respects far from common, but who, from the ambition of being entirely uncommon in thinking and writing, studiously and ingeniously, avoids nature and good taste. A profusion of the most ambiguous subtleties expressed in ostentatious language, are scattered throughout the work; and these are the more offensive, in consequence of their union with the really grand view of the relationship of man to nature and his Creator, which forms the subject of the treatise. Gracian would have been an excellent writer had not he so anxiously wished to be an extraordinary one.”[567]

[567] Hist. of Spanish Literature, p. 533.

14. The writings of Gracian seem in general to be the quintessence of bad taste. The worst of all, probably, is El Eroe, which is admitted to be almost unintelligible by the number of far-fetched expressions, though there is more than one French translation of it. El político Fernando, a panegyric on Ferdinand the catholic, seems as empty as it is affected and artificial. The style of Gracian is always pointed, emphatic, full of that which looks like profundity or novelty, though neither deep nor new. He seems to have written on a maxim he recommends to the man of the world: “if he desires that all should look up to him, let him permit himself to be known, but not to be understood.”[568] His treatise entitled Agudeza y arte di ingenio is a system of concetti, digested under their different heads, and selected from Latin, Italian, and Spanish writers of that and the preceding age. It is said in the Biographie Universelle that this work, though too metaphysical, is useful in the critical history of literature. Gracian obtained a certain degree of popularity in France and England.

[568] Si quiere que le veneren todos, permítase al conocimiento, no a la comprehensión.

|French prose. Du Vair.|

15. The general taste of French writers in the sixteenth century, as we have seen, was simple and lively, full of sallies of natural wit and a certain archness of observation, but deficient in those higher qualities of language which the study of the ancients had taught men to admire. In public harangues, in pleadings, and in sermons, these characteristics of the French manner were either introduced out of place, or gave way to a tiresome pedantry. Du Vair was the first who endeavoured to bring in a more elaborate and elevated diction. Nor was this confined to the example he gave. In 1607, he published a treatise on French eloquence, and on the causes through which it had remained at so low a point. This work relates chiefly to the eloquence of the bar, or at least that of public speakers, and the causes which he traces are chiefly such as would operate on that kind alone. But some of his observations are applicable to style in the proper sense; and his treatise has been reckoned the first which gave France the rules of good writing, and the desire to practice them.[569] A modern critic who censures the Latinisms of Du Vair’s style, admits that his treatise on eloquence makes an epoch in the language.[570]

[569] Gibert, Jugemens des Savans sur les auteurs qui ont traité de la rhétorique. This work is annexed to some editions of Baillet. Goujet has copied or abridged Gibert, without distinct acknowledgement, and not always carefully preserving the sense.

[570] Neufchateau, préface aux Œuvres de Pascal, p. 181.

|Balzac.|

|Character of his writings.|

16. A more distinguished æra, however, is dated from 1625, when the letters of Balzac were published.[571] There had indeed been a few intermediate works, which contributed, though now little known, to the improvement of the language. Among these, the translation of Florus by Coeffeteau was reckoned a masterpiece of French style, and Vaugelas refers more frequently to this than to any other book. The French were very strong in translations from the classical writers; and to this they are certainly much indebted for the purity and correctness they reached in their own language. These translators, however, could only occupy a secondary place. Balzac himself is hardly read. “The polite world,” it was said a hundred years since, “knows nothing now of these works, which were once its delight.”[572] But his writings are not formed to delight those, who wish either to be merry or wise, to laugh or to learn; yet he has real excellencies, besides those which may be deemed relative to the age in which he came. His language is polished, his sentiments are just but sometimes common, the cadence of his periods is harmonious, but too artificial and uniform; on the whole, he approaches to the tone of a languid sermon, and leaves a tendency to yawn. But in his time superficial truths were not so much proscribed as at present; the same want of depth belongs to almost all the moralists in Italian and in modern Latin. Balzac is a moralist with a pure heart and a love of truth and virtue, somewhat alloyed by the spirit of flattery towards persons, however he may declaim about courts and courtiers in general, a competent erudition and a good deal of observation of the world. In his Aristippe, addressed to Christina, and consequently a late work, he deals much in political precepts and remarks, some of which might be read with advantage. But he was accused of borrowing his thoughts from the ancients, which the author of an Apology for Balzac seems not wholly to deny. This apology indeed had been produced by a book on the Conformity of the eloquence of M. Balzac with that of the ancients.

[571] The same writer fixes on this as an epoch, and it was generally admitted in the seventeenth century. The editor of Balzac’s Works in 1665, says, after speaking of the unformed state of the French language, full of provincial idioms and incorrect phrases: M. de Balzac est venu en ce temps de confusion et de désordre, où toutes les lectures qu’il faisoit, et toutes les actions qu’il entendoit lui devoient être suspectes, où il avoit à se défier de tous les maîtres et de tous les exemples; et où il ne pouvoit arriver à son but qu’en s’éloignant de tous les chemins battus, ni marcher dans la bonne route qu’après se l’être ouverte à lui même. Il l’a ouverte en effet, et pour lui et pour les autres; il y a fait entrer un grand nombre d’heureux génies, dont il étoit le guide et le modèle: et si la France voit aujourd’hui que ses écrivains sont plus polis et plus réguliers, que ceux d’Espagne et d’Italie, il faut qu’elle en rende l’honneur à ce grand homme, dont la mémoire lui doit être en vénération.... La même obligation que nous avons a M. de Malherbe pour la poésie, nous l’avons a M. de Balzac pour la prose; il lui a prescrit des bornes et des régles; il lui a donné de la douceur et de la force, il a montré que l’éloquence doit avoir des accords, aussi bien que la musique, et il a sçu mêler si adroitement cette diversité de sons et de cadences, qu’il n’est point de plus délicieux concert que celui de ses paroles. C’est en plaçant tous les mots avec tant d’ordre et de justesse qu’il ne laisse rien de mol ni de foible dans son discours, &c. This regard to the cadence of his periods is characteristic of Balzac. It has not, in general, been much practised in France, notwithstanding some splendid exceptions, especially in Bossuet. Olivet observes, that it was the peculiar glory of Balzac to have shown the capacity of the language for this rhythm. Hist. de l’Acad. Française, p. 84. But has not Du Vair some claim also? Neufchateau gives a much more limited eulogy of Balzac. Il avoit pris à la lettre les reflections de Du Vair sur la trop grande bassesse de notre éloquence. Il s’en forma une haute idée; mais il se trompe d’abord dans l’application, car il porta dans le style épistolaire qui doit être familier et leger, l’enflure hyperbolique, la pompe, et le nombre, qui ne convient qu’aux grandes déclamations et aux harangues oratoires.... Ce défaut de Balzac contribua peut être à son succès; car le gout n’étoit pas formé; mais il se corrigea dans la suite, et en parcourant son recueil on s’aperçoit des progrès sensibles qu’il faisoit avec l’age. Ce recueil si précieux pour l’histoire de notre littérature a eu long temps une vogue extraordinaire. Nos plus grands auteurs l’avoient bien étudié. Molière lui a emprunté quelques idées.

[572] Goujet, i., 426.

|His letters.|

17. The letters of Balzac are in twenty-seven books; they begin in 1620 and end about 1653; the first portion having appeared in 1625. “He passed all his life,” says Vigneul-Marville, “in writing letters, without ever catching the right characteristics of that style.”[573] This demands a peculiar ease and naturalness of expression, for want of which they seem no genuine exponents of friendship or gallantry, and hardly of polite manners. His wit was not free from pedantry, and did not come from him spontaneously. Hence, he was little fitted to address ladies, even the Rambouillets; and indeed he had acquired so laboured and artificial a way of writing letters, that even those to his sister, though affectionate, smell too much of the lamp. His advocates admit that they are to be judged rather by the rules of oratorical than epistolary composition.

[573] Mélanges de Littérature, vol. i., p. 126. He adds, however, that Balzac had “un talent particulier pour embellir notre langue.” The writer whom I quote under the name of Vigneul-Marville which he assumed was D’Argonne, a Benedictine of Rouen.

18. In the moral dissertations, such as that entitled the Prince, this elaborate manner is of course not less discernible, but not so unpleasant or out of place. Balzac has been called the father of the French language, the master and model of the great men who have followed him. But it is confessed by all that he wanted the fine taste to regulate his style according to the subject. Hence, he is pompous and inflated upon ordinary topics; and in a country so quick to seize the ridiculous as his own, not all his nobleness, purity, and vigour of style, not the passages of eloquence which we often find, have been sufficient to redeem him from the sarcasms of those who have had more power to amuse. The stateliness, however, of Balzac is less offensive and extravagant than the affected intensity of language which distinguishes the style of the present age on both sides of the Channel, and which is in fact a much worse modification of the same fault.

|Voiture.--Hotel Rambouillet.|

19. A contemporary and rival of Balzac, though very unlike in most respects, was Voiture. Both one and the other were received with friendship and admiration in a celebrated society of Paris, the first which, on this side of the Alps, united the aristocracy of rank and of genius in one circle, that of the Hotel Rambouillet. Catherine de Vivonne, widow of the Marquis de Rambouillet, was the owner of this mansion. It was frequented, during the long period of her life, by all that was distinguished in France, by Richelieu and Condé, as much as by Corneille, and a long host of inferior men of letters. The heiress of this family, Julie d’Angennes, beautiful and highly accomplished, became the central star of so bright a galaxy. The love of intellectual attainments, both in mother and daughter, the sympathy and friendship they felt for those who displayed them, as well as their moral worth, must render their names respectable; but these were in some measure sullied by false taste and what we may consider an habitual affectation even in their conduct. We can scarcely give another name to the caprice of Julia, who, in the fashion of romance, compelled the Duke of Montausier to carry on a twelve years’ courtship, and only married him in the decline of her beauty. This patient lover, himself one of the most remarkable men in the court of Louis XIV., had many years before presented her with what has been called The Garland of Julia, a collection to which the poets and wits of Paris had contributed. Every flower, represented in a drawing, had its appropriate little poem, and all conspired to the praise of Julia.

20. Voiture is chiefly known by his letters; his other writings, at least, are inferior. These begin about 1627, and are addressed to Madame de Rambouillet and to several other persons of both sexes. Though much too laboured and affected, they are evidently the original type of the French epistolary school, including those in England who have formed themselves upon it. Pope very frequently imitated Voiture, Walpole not so much in his general correspondence, but he knew how to fall into it. The object was to say what meant little with the utmost novelty in the mode, and with the most ingenious compliment to the person addressed; so that he should admire himself, and admire the writer. They are, of course, very tiresome after a short time; yet their ingenuity is not without merit. Balzac is more solemn and dignified, and it must be owned that he has more meaning. Voiture seems to have fancied that good sense spoils a man of wit. But he has not so much wit as _esprit_; and his letters serve to exemplify the meaning of that word. Pope, in addressing ladies, was nearly the ape of Voiture. It was unfortunately thought necessary, in such a correspondence, either to affect despairing love, which was to express itself with all possible gaiety, or where love was too presumptuous, as with the Rambouillets, to pour out a torrent of nonsensical flattery, which was to be rendered tolerable by far-fetched turns of thought. Voiture has the honour of having rendered this style fashionable. But if the bad taste of others had not perverted his own, Voiture would have been a good writer. His letters, especially those written from Spain, are sometimes truly witty, and always vivacious. Voltaire, who speaks contemptuously of Voiture, might have been glad to have the author of some of his jeux d’esprit; that, for example, addressed to the Prince of Condé in the character of a pike, founded on a game where the Prince had played that fish. We should remember also, that Voiture held his place in good society upon the tacit condition that he should always strive to be witty.[574]

[574] Nothing, says Olivet, could be more opposite than Balzac and Voiture. L’un se portoit toujours au sublime, l’autre toujours au délicat. L’un avoit une imagination enjouée, qui faisoit prendre à toutes ses pensées un air de galanterie. L’un même lorsqu’il vouloit plaisanter, étoit toujours grave; l’autre, dans les occasions même sérieuses, trouvoit à rire. Hist. de l’Académie, p. 83.

|Establishment of French Academy.|

21. But the Hotel Rambouillet, with its false theories of taste derived in a great measure from the romances of Scudery and Calprenede, and encouraged by the agreeably artificial manner of Voiture, would have produced, in all probability, but a transient effect. A far more important event was the establishment of the French Academy. France was ruled by a great minister who loved her glory and his own. This, indeed, has been common to many statesmen, but it was a more peculiar honour to Richelieu, that he felt the dignity which letters confer on a nation. He was himself not deficient in literary taste; his epistolary style is manly and not without elegance; he wrote theology in his own name, and history in that of Mezeray; but, what is most to the present purpose, his remarkable fondness for the theatre led him not only to invent subjects for other poets, but, as it has been believed, to compose one forgotten tragi-comedy, Mirame, without assistance.[575] He availed himself fortunately of an opportunity which almost every statesman would have disregarded, to found the most illustrious institution in the annals of polite literature.

[575] Fontenelle, Hist. du Thèatre, p. 96.

22. The French Academy sprang from a private society of men of letters at Paris, who, about the year 1629, agreed to meet once a week, as at an ordinary visit, conversing on all subjects and especially on literature. Such among them as were authors communicated their works, and had the advantage of free and fair criticism. This continued for three or four years with such harmony and mutual satisfaction, that the old men, who remembered this period, says their historian, Pelisson, looked back upon it as a golden age. They were but nine in number, of whom Gombauld and Chapelain are the only names by any means famous, and their meetings were at first very private. More by degrees were added, among others Boisrobert, a favourite of Richelieu, who liked to hear from him the news of the town. The Cardinal, pleased with the account of this society, suggested their public establishment. This, it is said, was unpleasing to every one of them, and some proposed to refuse it; but the consideration that the offers of such a man were not to be slighted overpowered their modesty; and they consented to become a royal institution. They now enlarged their numbers, created officers, and began to keep registers of their proceedings. These records commence on March 13, 1634, and are the basis of Pelisson’s history. The name of French Academy was chosen after some deliberation. They were established by letters patent in January, 1635; which the parliament of Paris enregistered with great reluctance, requiring not only a letter from Richelieu, but an express order from the king; and when this was completed in July, 1637, it was with a singular proviso that the Academy should meddle with nothing but the embellishment and improvement of the French language, and such books as might be written by themselves, or by others who should desire their interference. This learned body of lawyers had some jealousy of the innovations of Richelieu; and one of them said it reminded him of the satire of Juvenal, where the senate, after ceasing to bear its part in public affairs, was consulted about the sauce for a turbot.[576]

[576] Pelisson, Hist. de l’Acadèmie Française.

|Its objects and constitution.|

23. The professed object of the Academy was to purify the language from vulgar, technical, or ignorant usages, and to establish a fixed standard. The Academicians undertook to guard scrupulously the correctness of their own works, examining the arguments, the method, the style, the structure of each particular word. It was proposed by one that they should swear not to use any word which had been rejected by a plurality of votes. They soon began to labour in their vocation, always bringing words to the test of good usage, and deciding accordingly. These decisions are recorded in their registers. Their number was fixed by the letters patent at forty, having a director, chancellor, and secretary; the two former changed every two, afterwards every three months, the last chosen for life. They read discourses weekly; which by the titles of some that Pelisson has given us, seem rather trifling and in the style of the Italian Academies; but this practise was soon disused. Their more important and ambitious occupations were to compile a dictionary and a grammar: Chapelain drew up the scheme of the former, in which it was determined, for the sake of brevity, to give no quotations, but to form it from about twenty-six good authors in prose, and twenty in verse. Vaugelas was entrusted with the chief direction of this work.

|It publishes a critique on the Cid.|

24. The Academy was subjected in its very infancy, to a severe trial of that literary integrity without which such an institution can only escape from being pernicious to the republic of letters, by becoming too despicable and odious to produce mischief. On the appearance of the Cid, Richelieu, who had taken up a strong prejudice against it, insisted that the Academy should publish their opinion on this play. The more prudent part of that body were very loth to declare themselves at so early a period of their own existence; but the Cardinal was not apt to take excuses; and a committee of three was appointed to examine the Cid itself and the observations upon it which Scudery had already published. Five months elapsed before the Sentimens de l’Académie Française sur la Tragédie du Cid were made public in November, 1637.[577] These are expressed with much respect for Corneille, and profess to be drawn up with his assent, as well as at the instance of Scudery. It has been not uncommon to treat this criticism as a servile homage to power. But a perusal of it will not lead us to confirm so severe a reproach. The Sentimens de l’Académie are drawn up with great good sense and dignity. The spirit indeed of critical orthodoxy is apparent; yet this was surely pardonable in an age when the violation of rules had as yet produced nothing but such pieces as those of Hardy. It in easy to sneer at Aristotle when we have a Shakspeare; but Aristotle formed his rules on the practice of Sophocles. The Academy could not have done better than by inculcating the soundest rules of criticism, but they were a little too narrow in their application. The particular judgments which they pass on each scene of the play, as well as those on the style, seem for the most part very just, and such as later critics have generally adopted; so that we can really see little ground for the allegation of undue compliance with the Cardinal’s prejudices, except in the frigid tone of their praise, and in their omission to proclaim that a great dramatic genius had arisen in France.[578] But this is so much the common vice or blindness of critics, that it may have sprung less from baseness, than from a fear to compromise their own superiority by vulgar admiration. The Academy had great pretensions, and Corneille was not yet the Corneille of France and of the world.

[577] Pelisson. The printed edition bears the date of 1638.

[578] They conclude by saying that in spite of the faults of this play, la naïveté et la véhémence de les passions, la force et la délicatesse de plusieurs de ses pensées, et cet agrément inexplicable qui se mêle dans tous ses défauts lui ont acquis un rang considérable entre les poèmes Français de ce genre qui ont le plus donné de satisfaction. Si l’auteur ne doit pas toute sa réputation à son mérite il ne la doit pas toute à son bonheur, et la nature lui a été assez libérale pour excuser la fortune si elle lui a été prodigue.

The Academy justly, in my opinion, blame Corneille for making Chimène consent to marry Rodrigue the same day that he had killed her father. Cela surpasse toute sorte de créance, et ne peut vraisemblablement tomber dans l’ame non seulement d’une sage fille, mais d’une qui seroit le plus dépouillée d’honneur et d’humanité, &c., p. 49.

|Vaugelas’s remarks on the French language.|

25. Gibert, Goujet, and other writers enumerate several works on the grammar of the French language in this period. But they were superseded, and we may almost say that an æra was made in the national literature, by the publication of Vaugelas, Rémarques sur la Langue Française, in 1649. Thomas Corneille, who, as well as Patru, published notes on Vaugelas, observes that the language has only been written with politeness since the appearance of these remarks. They were not at first received with general approbation, and some even in later times thought them too scrupulous; but they gradually became of established authority. Vaugelas is always clear, modest, and ingenuous in stating his opinion. His remarks are 547 in number, no gross fault being noticed, nor any one which is not found in good authors. He seldom mentions those whom he censures. His test of correct language is the manner of speaking in use with the best part (la plus saine partie) of the court, conformably with the manner of writing in the best part of contemporary authors. But though we must have recourse to good authors in order to establish an indisputably good usage, yet the court contributes incomparably more than books; the consent of the latter being as it were the seal and confirmation of what is spoken at court, and deciding what is there doubtful. And those who study the best authors get rid of many faults common at court, and acquire a peculiar purity of style. None, however, can dispense with a knowledge of what is reckoned good language at court, since much that is spoken there will hardly be found in books. In writing, it is otherwise, and he admits that the study of good authors will enable us to write well, though we shall write still better by knowing how to speak well. Vaugelas tells us that his knowledge was acquired by long practice at court, and by the conversation of Cardinal Perron and of Coeffeteau.

|La Mothe le Vayer.|

26. La Mothe le Vayer in his Considérations sur l’Eloquence Française, 1647, has endeavoured to steer a middle course between the old and the new schools of French style, but with a marked desire to withstand the latter. He blames Du Vair for the strange and barbarous words he employs. He laughs also at the nicety of those who were beginning to object to a number of common French words. One would not use the conjunction Car; against which folly Le Vayer wrote a separate treatise.[579] He defends the use of quotations in a different language, which some purists in French style had in horror. But this treatise seems not to contain much that is valuable, and it is very diffuse.

[579] This was Gomberville, in whose immense romance, Polexandre, it is said that this word only occurs three times; a discovery which does vast honour to the person who took the pains to make it.

|Legal speeches of Patru.|

27. Two French writers may be reckoned worthy of a place in this chapter, who are, from the nature of their works, not generally known out of their own country, and whom I cannot refer with absolute propriety to this rather than to the ensuing period, except by a certain character and manner of writing, which belongs more to the antecedent than the later moiety of the seventeenth century. These were two lawyers, Patru and Le Maistre. The pleadings of Patru appear to me excellent in their particular line of forensic eloquence, addressed to intelligent and experienced judges. They greatly resemble what are called the private orations of Demosthenes, and those of Lysias and Isæus, especially, perhaps, the last. No ambitious ornament, no appeal to the emotions of the heart, no bold figures of rhetoric are permitted in the Attic severity of this style; or, if they ever occur, it is to surprise us as things rather uncommon in the place where they appear than in themselves. Patru does not even employ the exordium usual in speeches, but rushes instantaneously, though always perspicuously, into his statement of the case. In the eyes of many this is no eloquence at all, and it requires perhaps some taste for legal reasoning to enter fully into its merit. But the Greek orators are masters whom a modern lawyer need not blush to follow, and to follow, as Patru did, in their respect for the tribunal they addressed. They spoke to rather a numerous body of judges; but those were Athenians, and, as we have reason to believe, the best and most upright, the salt of that vicious city. Patru again spoke to the parliament of Paris, men too well versed in the ways of law and justice to be the dupes of tinkling sound. He is, therefore, plain, lucid, well-arranged, but not emphatic or impetuous; the subjects of his published speeches would not admit of such qualities; though Patru is said to have employed on some occasions the burning words of the highest oratory. His style has always been reckoned purely and rigidly French; but I have been led rather to praise what has struck me in the substance of his pleadings; which, whether read at this day in France or not, are, I may venture to say, worthy to be studied by lawyers, like those to which I have compared them, the strictly forensic portion of Greek oratory. In some speeches of Patru which are more generally praised, that on his own reception in the Academy, and one complimentary to Christina, it has seemed to me that he falls very short of his judicial style; the ornaments are common-place, and such as belong to the panegyrical department of oratory, in all ages less important and valuable than the other two. It should be added, that Patru was not only one of the purest writers, but one of the best critics whom France possessed.[580]

[580] Perrault says of Patru in his Hommes Illustres de France, vol. ii., p. 66. Ses plaidoyers servent _encore aujourd’hui_ de modèle pour écrire correctement en notre langue. Yet they were not much above thirty years old--so much had the language changed, as to rules of writing, within that time.

|And of Le Maistre.|

28. The forensic speeches of Le Maistre are more eloquent, in a popular sense of the word, more ardent, more imaginative, than those of Patru; the one addresses the judges alone, the other has a view to the audience; the one seeks the success of his cause alone, the other, that and his own glory together. The one will be more prized by the lovers of legal reasoning, the other by the majority of mankind. The one more resembles the orations of Demosthenes for his private clients, the others those of Cicero. Le Maistre is fervid and brilliant, he hurries us with him; in all his pleadings, warmth is his first characteristic, and a certain elegance is the second. In the power of statement, I do not perceive that he is inferior to Patru; both are excellent. Wherever great moral or social topics, or extensive views of history and human nature can be employed, Le Maistre has the advantage. Both are concise, relatively to the common verbosity of the bar; but Le Maistre has much more that might be retrenched; not that it is redundant in expression, but unnecessary in substance. This is owing to his ambitious display of general erudition; his quotations are too frequent and too ornamental, partly drawn from the ancients, but more from the fathers. Ambrose, in fact, Jerome and Augustin, Chrysostom, Basil, and Gregory, were the models whom the writers of this age were accustomed to study; and hence, they are often, and Le Maistre among the rest, too apt to declaim where they should prove, and to use arguments from analogy, rather striking to the common hearer, than likely to weigh much with a tribunal. He has less simplicity, less purity of taste than Patru; his animated language would, in our courts, be frequently effective with a jury, but would seem too indefinite and common-place to the judges; we should crowd to hear Le Maistre, we should be compelled to decide with Patru. They are both, however, very superior advocates, and do great honour to the French bar.

|Improvement in English style.|

29. A sensible improvement in the general style of English writers had come on before the expiration of the sixteenth century; the rude and rough phrases, sometimes requiring a glossary, which lie as spots of rust on the pages of Latimer, Grafton, Aylmer, or even Ascham, had been chiefly polished away; if we meet in Sydney, Hooker, or the prose of Spenser, with obsolete expressions or forms, we find none that are unintelligible, none that give us offence. But to this next period belong most of those whom we commonly reckon our old English writers; men often of such sterling worth for their sense, that we might read them with little regard to their language, yet, in some instances at least, possessing much that demands praise in this respect. They are generally nervous and effective, copious to redundancy in their command of words, apt to employ what seemed to them ornament with much imagination rather than judicious taste, yet seldom degenerating into common-place and indefinite phraseology. They have, however, many defects; some of them, especially the most learned, are full of pedantry, and deform their pages by an excessive and preposterous mixture of Latinisms unknown before;[581] at other times we are disgusted by colloquial and even vulgar idioms or proverbs; nor is it uncommon to find these opposite blemishes not only in the same author, but in the same passages. Their periods, except in a very few, are ill-constructed and tediously prolonged; their ears (again with some exceptions) seem to have been insensible to the beauty of rhythmical prose; grace is commonly wanting, and their notion of the artifices of style, when they thought at all about them, was not congenial to our own language. This may be deemed a general description of the English writers under James and Charles; we shall now proceed to mention some of the most famous, and who may, in a certain degree, be deemed to modify this censure.

[581] In Pratt’s edition of Bishop Hall’s works, we have a glossary of obsolete or unusual words employed by him. They amount to more than 1,100, the greater part being of Latin or Greek origin; some are Gallicisms.

|Earl of Essex.|

30. I will begin with a passage of very considerable beauty, which is here out of its place, since it was written in the year 1598. It is found in the Apology for the Earl of Essex, published among the works of Lord Bacon, and passing, I suppose, commonly for his. It seems, nevertheless, in my judgment, far more probably genuine. We have nowhere in our early writers a flow of words so easy and graceful, a structure so harmonious, a series of antitheses so spirited without affectation, an absence of quaintness, pedantry, and vulgarity, so truly gentleman-like, a paragraph so worthy of the most brilliant man of his age. This could not have come from Bacon, who never divested himself of a certain didactic formality, even if he could have counterfeited that chivalrous generosity which it was not in his nature to feel. It is the language of a soldier’s heart, with the unstudied grace of a noble courtier.[582]

[582] “A word for my friendship with the chief men of action, and favour generally to the men of war; and then I come to their main objection, which is my crossing of the treaty in hand. For most of them that are accounted the chief men of action, I do confess, I do entirely love them. They have been my companions both abroad and at home; some of them began the wars with me, most have had place under me, and many have had me a witness of their rising from captains, lieutenants, and private men, to those charges, which since by their virtue they have obtained. Now that I have tried them, I would choose them for friends, if I had them not; before I had tried them, God, by his providence, chose them for me. I love them for mine own sake; for I find sweetness in their conversation, strong assistance in their employments with me, and happiness in their friendship. I love them for their virtues’ sake, and for their greatness of mind (for little minds, though never so full of virtue, can be but a little virtuous); and for their great understanding; for to understand little things, or things not of use, is little better than to understand nothing at all. I love them for their affections; for self-loving men love ease, pleasure, and profit; but they that love pains, danger, and fame, show that they love public profit more than themselves. I love them for my country’s sake; for they are England’s best armour of defence and weapons of offence. If we may have peace, they have purchased it; if we must have war, they must manage it. Yet, while we are doubtful and in treaty, we must value ourselves by what may be done, and the enemy will value us by what hath been done by our chief men of action.

“That generally I am affected to the men of war, it should not seem strange to any reasonable man. Every man doth love them of his own profession. The grave judges favour the students of the law; the reverend bishops the labourers in the ministry; and I (since her Majesty hath yearly used my service in her late actions) must reckon myself in the number of her men of war. Before, action providence makes me cherish them for what they can do; in action, necessity makes me value them for the service they do; and, after action, experience and thankfulness makes me love them for the service they have done.”

|Knolles’s History of the Turks.|

31. Knolles, already known by a spirited translation of Bodin’s Commonwealth, published in 1610 a copious History of the Turks, bringing down his narrative to the most recent times. Johnson in a paper of the Rambler has given him the superiority over all English historians. “He has displayed all the excellencies that narration can admit. His style, though somewhat obscured by time, and vitiated by false wit, is pure, nervous, elevated, and clear.... Nothing could have sunk this author into obscurity but the remoteness and barbarity of the people whose story he relates. It seldom happens that all circumstances concur to happiness or fame. The nation which produced this great historian has the grief of seeing his genius employed upon a foreign and uninteresting subject; and that writer who might have secured perpetuity to his name by a history of his own country, has exposed himself to the danger of oblivion by recounting enterprises and revolutions of which none desire to be informed.”[583] The subject, however, appeared to Knolles, and I know not how we can say erroneously, one of the most splendid he could have selected. It was the rise and growth of a mighty nation, second only to Rome in the constancy of success, and in the magnitude of empire; a nation fierce and terrible, the present scourge of half Christendom, and though from our remoteness not very formidable to ourselves, still one of which not the bookish man in his closet or the statesman in council had alone heard, but the smith at his anvil, and the husbandman at his plough. A long decrepitude of the Turkish empire on one hand, and our frequent alliance with it on the other, have obliterated the apprehensions and interests of every kind which were awakened throughout Europe by its youthful fury and its mature strength. The subject was also new in England, yet rich in materials; various, in comparison with ordinary history, though not perhaps so fertile of philosophical observation as some others, and furnishing many occasions for the peculiar talents of Knolles. These were displayed, not in depth of thought, or copiousness of collateral erudition, but in a style and in a power of narration which Johnson has not too highly extolled. His descriptions are vivid and animated; circumstantial, but not to feebleness; his characters are drawn with a strong pencil. It is indeed difficult to estimate the merits of an historian very accurately without having before our eyes his original sources: he may probably have translated much that we admire, and he had shown that he knew how to translate. In the style of Knolles there is sometimes, as Johnson has hinted, a slight excess of desire to make every phrase effective; but he is exempt from the usual blemishes of his age; and his command of the language is so extensive, that we should not err in placing him among the first of our elder writers. Comparing as a specimen of Knolles’s manner, his description of the execution of Mustapha, son of Solyman, with that given by Robertson, where the latter historian has been as circumstantial as his limits would permit, we shall perceive that the former paints better his story, and deepens better its interest.[584]

[583] Rambler, No. 122.

[584] Knolles, p. 515. Robertson, book xi.

|Raleigh’s History of the World.|

32. Raleigh’s History of the World is a proof of the respect for laborious learning that had long distinguished Europe. We should expect from the prison-hours of a soldier, a courtier, a busy intriguer in state affairs, a poet and man of genius, something well worth our notice; but hardly a prolix history of the ancient world, hardly disquisitions on the site of Paradise and the travels of Cain. These are probably translated with little alteration from some of the learned writings of the Continent; they are by much the least valuable portion of Raleigh’s work. The Greek and Roman story is told more fully and exactly than by any earlier English author, and with a plain eloquence, which has given this book a classical reputation in our language, though from its length and the want of that critical sifting of facts which we now justly demand, it is not greatly read. Raleigh has intermingled political reflections, and illustrated his history by episodes from modern times, which perhaps are now the most interesting passages. It descends only to the second Macedonian war; the continuation might have been more generally valuable; but either the death of Prince Henry, as Raleigh himself tells us, or the new schemes of ambition which unfortunately opened upon his eyes, prevented the execution of the large plan he had formed. There is little now obsolete in the words of Raleigh, nor, to any great degree, in his turn of phrase; the periods, when pains have been taken with them, show that artificial structure which we find in Sydney and Hooker; he is less pedantic than most of his contemporaries, seldom low, never affected.[585]

[585] Raleigh’s History was so little known, that Warburton, in the preface to his Julian, took from it a remarkable passage without acknowledgment; and Dr. Parr, though a man of very extensive reading, extolled it as Warburton’s not knowing, what he afterwards discovered, the original source. The passage is as follows in Raleigh, Warburton of course having altered some of the expressions. “We have left it (the Roman empire) flourishing in the middle of the field, having rooted up or cut down all that kept it from the eyes and admiration of the world. But after some continuance, it shall begin to lose the beauty it had; the storms of ambition shall beat her great boughs and branches one against another; her leaves shall fall off, her limbs wither, and a rabble of barbarous nations enter the field and cut her down.” Raleigh’s History, ad finem.

Notwithstanding the praise that has been bestowed on this sentence, it is open to some censure; the simile and subject are too much confounded; a rabble of barbarous nations might be required to subvert the Roman empire, but make an odd figure in cutting down a tree. The rhythm and spirit indeed are admirable.

|Daniel’s History of England.|

33. Daniel’s History of England from the Conquest to the Reign of Edward III., published in 1618, is deserving of some attention on account of its language. It is written with a freedom from all stiffness, and a purity of style which hardly any other work of so early a date exhibits. These qualities are indeed so remarkable that it would require a good deal of critical observation to distinguish it even from writings of the reign of Anne; and where it differs from them (I speak only of the secondary class of works, which have not much individuality of manner), it is by a more select idiom, and by an absence of the Gallicism or vulgarity which are often found in that age. It is true that the merits of Daniel are chiefly negative; he is never pedantic or antithetical or low, as his contemporaries were apt to be; but his periods are ill constructed, he has little vigour or elegance; and it is only by observing how much pains he must have taken to reject phrases which were growing obsolete, that we give him credit for having done more than follow the common stream of easy writing. A slight tinge of archaism, and a certain majesty of expression, relatively to colloquial usage, were thought by Bacon and Raleigh congenial to an elevated style; but Daniel, a gentleman of the king’s household, wrote as the court spoke, and his facility would be pleasing if his sentences had a less negligent structure. As an historian, he has recourse only to common authorities; but his narration is fluent and perspicuous, with a regular vein of good sense, more the characteristic of his mind, both in verse and prose, than any commanding vigour.

|Bacon.|

34. The style of Bacon has an idiosyncracy which we might expect from his genius. It can rarely indeed happen, and only in men of secondary talents, that the language they use is not, by its very choice and collocation, as well as its meaning, the representative of an individuality that distinguishes their turn of thought. Bacon is elaborate, sententious, often witty, often metaphorical; nothing could be spared; his analogies are generally striking and novel; his style is clear, precise, forcible; yet there is some degree of stiffness about it, and in mere language he is inferior to Raleigh. The History of Henry VII., admirable as many passages are, seems to be written rather too ambitiously, and with too great an absence of simplicity.

|Milton.|

35. The polemical writings of Milton, which chiefly fall within this period, contain several bursts of his splendid imagination and grandeur of soul. They are, however, much inferior to the Areopagitica, or Plea for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing. Many passages in this famous tract are admirably eloquent; an intense love of liberty and truth glows through it, the majestic soul of Milton breathes such high thoughts as had not been uttered before; yet even here he frequently sinks in a single instant, as is usual with our old writers, from his highest flights to the ground; his intermixture of familiar with learned phraseology is unpleasing, his structure is affectedly elaborate, and he seldom reaches any harmony. If he turns to invective, as sometimes in this treatise, and more in his Apology for Smectymnuus, it is mere ribaldrous vulgarity blended with pedantry; his wit is always poor and without ease. An absence of idiomatic grace, and an use of harsh inversions violating the rules of the language, distinguish, in general, the writings of Milton, and require, in order to compensate them, such high beauties as will sometimes occur.

|Clarendon.|

36. The History of Clarendon may be considered as belonging rather to this than to the second period of the century, both by the probable date of composition and by the nature of its style. He is excellent in everything that he has performed with care; his characters are beautifully delineated, his sentiments have often a noble gravity which the length of his periods, far too great in itself, seems to befit; but in the general course of his narration he is negligent of grammar and perspicuity, with little choice of words, and therefore sometimes idiomatic without ease or elegance. The official papers on the royal side, which are generally attributed to him, are written in a masculine and majestic tone, far superior to those of the parliament. The latter had, however, a writer who did them honour: May’s History of the Parliament is a good model of genuine English; he is plain, terse, and vigorous, never slovenly, though with few remarkable passages, and is, in style as well as substance, a kind of contrast to Clarendon.

|The Icon Basilice.|

37. The famous Icon Basilice, ascribed to Charles I., may deserve a place in literary history. If we could trust its panegyrists, few books in our language have done it more credit by dignity of sentiment and beauty of style. It can hardly be necessary for me to express my unhesitating conviction that it was solely written by Bishop Gauden, who, after the Restoration, unequivocally claimed it as his own. The folly and impudence of such a claim, if it could not be substantiated, are not to be presumed as to any man of good understanding, fair character, and high station, without stronger evidence than has been alleged on the other side; especially when we find that those who had the best means of inquiry, at a time when it seems impossible that the falsehood of Gauden’s assertion should not have been demonstrated, if it were false, acquiesced in his pretensions. We have very little to place against this, except secondary testimony, vague, for the most part, in itself, and collected by those whose veracity has not been put to the test like that of Gauden.[586] The style, also, of the Icon Basilice has been identified by Mr. Todd with that of Gauden, by the use of several phrases, so peculiar that we can hardly conceive them to have suggested themselves to more than one person. It is, nevertheless, superior to his acknowledged writings. A strain of majestic melancholy is well kept up; but the personated sovereign is rather too theatrical for real nature, the language is too rhetorical and amplified, the periods too artificially elaborated. None but scholars and practised writers employ such a style as this.

[586] There is only one claimant, in a proper sense, for the Icon Basilice, which is Gauden himself; the king neither appears by himself or representative. And, though we may find several instances of plagiarism in literary history (one of the grossest being the publication by a Spanish friar, under another title, of a book already in print with the name of Hyperius of Marpurg, its real author), yet I cannot call to mind any, where a man known to the world has asserted in terms his own authorship of a book not written by himself, but universally ascribed to another, and which had never been in his possession. A story is told, and, I believe, truly, that a young man assumed the credit of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, while it was still anonymous. But this is widely different from the case of the Icon Basilice. We have had an interminable discussion as to the Letters of Junius. But no one has ever claimed this derelict property to himself, or told the world, I am Junius.

|Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.|

38. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy belongs, by its systematic divisions and its accumulated quotations, to the class of mere erudition; it seems, at first sight, like those tedious Latin folios, into which scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries threw the materials of their Adversaria, or common-place books, painfully selected and arranged by the labour of many years. But writing, fortunately, in English, and in a style not by any means devoid of point and terseness, with much good sense and observation of men as well as of books, and having also the skill of choosing his quotations for their rareness, oddity, and amusing character, without losing sight of their pertinence to the subject, he has produced a work of which, as is well known, Johnson said, that it was the only one which had ever caused him to leave his bed earlier than he had intended. Johnson, who seems to have had some turn for the singularities of learning, which fill the Anatomy of Melancholy, may perhaps have raised the credit of Burton higher than his desert. He is clogged by excess of reading, like others of his age, and we may peruse entire chapters without finding more than a few lines that belong to himself. This becomes a wearisome style, and, for myself, I have not found much pleasure in glancing over the Anatomy of Melancholy. It may be added that he has been a collector of stories far more strange than true, from those records of figments, the old medical writers of the sixteenth century, and other equally deceitful sources. Burton lived at Oxford, and his volumes are apparently a great sweeping of miscellaneous literature from the Bodleian library.

|Earle’s Characters.|

39. John Earle, after the Restoration bishop of Worcester, and then of Salisbury, is author of “Microcosmographia, or a Piece of the Worlde discovered in Essays and Characters,” published anonymously in 1628. In some of these short characters, Earle is worthy of comparison with La Bruyère; in others, perhaps the greater part, he has contented himself with pictures of ordinary manners, such as the varieties of occupation, rather than of intrinsic character, supply. In all, however, we find an acute observation and a happy humour of expression. The chapter entitled the Sceptic is best known; it is witty, but an insult throughout on the honest searcher after truth, which could have come only from one that was content to take up his own opinions for ease or profit. Earle is always gay and quick to catch the ridiculous, especially that of exterior appearances; his style is short, describing well with a few words, but with much of the affected quaintness of that age. It is one of those books which give us a picturesque idea of the manners of our fathers at a period now become remote, and for this reason it would deserve to be read.

|Overbury’s Characters.|

40. But the Microcosmography is not an original work in its plan or mode of execution; it is a close imitation of the Characters of Sir Thomas Overbury. They both belong to the favourite style of apophthegm, in which every sentence is a point or a witticism. Yet the entire character so delineated produces a certain effect; it is a Dutch picture, a Gerard Dow, somewhat too elaborate. Earle has more natural humour than Overbury, and hits his mark more neatly; the other is more satirical, but often abusive and vulgar. The “Fair and Happy Milk-maid,” often quoted, is the best of his characters. The wit is often trivial and flat; the sentiments have nothing in them general, or worthy of much resemblance; praise is only due to the graphic skill in delineating character. Earle is as clearly the better, as Overbury is the more original, writer.

|Jonson’s Discoveries.|

41. A book by Ben Jonson, entitled “Timber, or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter,” is altogether miscellaneous, the greater part being general moral remarks, while another portion deserves notice as the only book of English criticism in the first part of the seventeenth century. The observations are unconnected, judicious, sometimes witty, frequently severe. The style is what was called pregnant, leaving much to be filled up by the reader’s reflection. Good sense and a vigorous manner of grappling with every subject will generally be found in Jonson, but he does not reach any very profound criticism. His English Grammar is said by Gifford to have been destroyed in the conflagration of his study. What we have, therefore, under that name is, he thinks, to be considered as properly the materials of a more complete work that is lost. We have, as I apprehend, no earlier grammar upon so elaborate a plan; every rule is illustrated by examples, almost to redundance; but he is too copious on what is common to other languages, and perhaps not full enough as to our peculiar idiom. Nothing else deserving of the slightest notice can be added to this book of Jonson.

SECT. II.

ON FICTION.

_Cervantes--French Romances--Calprenede--Scuderi--Latin and English Works of Fiction._

|Publication of Don Quixote.|

42. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605. We have no reason, I believe, to suppose that it was written long before. It became immediately popular; and the admiration of the world raised up envious competitors, one of whom, Avellenada, published a continuation in a strain of invective against the author. Cervantes, who cannot be imagined to have ever designed the leaving his romance in so unfinished a state, took time about the second part, which did not appear till 1615.

|Its reputation.|

43. Don Quixote is the only book in the Spanish language which can now be said to possess much of an European reputation. It has, however, enjoyed enough to compensate for the neglect of all the rest. It is to Europe in general what Ariosto is to Italy, and Shakspeare to England; the one book to which the slightest allusions may be made without affectation, but not missed without discredit. Numerous translations and countless editions of them, in every language, bespeak its adaptation to mankind; no critic has been paradoxical enough to withhold his admiration, no reader has ventured to confess a want of relish for that in which the young and old, in every climate, have, age after age, taken delight. They have doubtless believed that they understood the author’s meaning; and, in giving the reins to the gaiety that his fertile invention and comic humour inspired, never thought of any deeper meaning than he announces, or delayed their enjoyment for any metaphysical investigation of his plan.

|New views of its design.|

44. A new school of criticism, however, has of late years arisen in Germany, acute, ingenious, and sometimes eminently successful in philosophical, or, as they denominate it, æsthetic analysis of works of taste, but gliding too much into refinement and conjectural hypothesis, and with a tendency to mislead men of inferior capacities for this kind of investigation into mere paradox and absurdity. An instance is supplied, in my opinion, by some remarks of Bouterwek, still more explicitly developed by Sismondi, on the design of Cervantes in Don Quixote, and which have been repeated in other publications. According to these writers, the primary idea is that of a “man of elevated character, excited by heroic and enthusiastic feelings to the extravagant pitch of wishing to restore the age of chivalry; nor is it possible to form a more mistaken notion of this work than by considering it merely as a satire, intended by the author to ridicule the absurd passion for reading old romances.”[587] “The fundamental idea of Don Quixote,” says Sismondi, “is the eternal contrast between the spirit of poetry and that of prose. Men of an elevated soul propose to themselves as the object of life to be the defenders of the weak, the support of the oppressed, the champions of justice and innocence. Like Don Quixote, they find on every side the image of the virtues they worship; they believe that disinterestedness, nobleness, courage, in short, knight errantry, are still prevalent; and with no calculation of their own powers, they expose themselves for an ungrateful world, they offer themselves as a sacrifice to the laws and rules of an imaginary state of society.”[588]

[587] Bouterwek, p. 334.

[588] Littérature du Midi, vol. iii., p. 339.

45. If this were a true representation of the scheme of Don Quixote, we cannot wonder that some persons should, as M. Sismondi tells us they do, consider it as the most melancholy book that has ever been written. They consider it also, no doubt, one of the most immoral, as chilling and pernicious in its influence on the social converse of mankind, as the Prince of Machiavel is on their political intercourse. “Cervantes,” he proceeds, “has shown us in some measure the vanity of greatness of soul and the delusion of heroism. He has drawn in Don Quixote a perfect man (un homme accompli), who is, nevertheless, the constant object of ridicule. Brave beyond the fabled knights he imitates, disinterested, honourable, generous, the most faithful and respectful of lovers, the best of masters, the most accomplished and well educated of gentlemen, all his enterprises end in discomfiture to himself, and in mischief to others.” M. Sismondi descants upon the perfections of the knight of La Mancha with a gravity which is not quite easy for his readers to preserve.

|Probably erroneous.|

46. It might be answered by a phlegmatic observer, that a mere enthusiasm for doing good, if excited by vanity, and not accompanied by common sense, will seldom be very serviceable to ourselves or to others; that men who, in their heroism and care for the oppressed, would throw open the cages of lions, and set galley-slaves at liberty, not forgetting to break the limbs of harmless persons whom they mistake for wrongdoers, are a class of whom Don Quixote is the real type; and that the world being much the worse for such heroes, it might not be immoral, notwithstanding their benevolent enthusiasm, to put them out of countenance by a little ridicule. This, however, is not, as I conceive, the primary aim of Cervantes; nor do I think that the exhibition of one great truth, as the predominant, but concealed, moral of a long work, is in the spirit of his age. He possessed a very thoughtful mind and a profound knowledge of humanity; yet the generalisation which the hypothesis of Bouterwek and Sismondi requires for the leading conception of Don Quixote, besides its being a little inconsistent with the valorous and romantic character of its author, belongs to a more advanced period of philosophy than his own. It will, at all events, I presume, be admitted that we cannot reason about Don Quixote except from the book, and I think it may be shown in a few words that these ingenious writers have been chiefly misled by some want of consistency which circumstances produced in the author’s delineation of his hero.

|Difference between the two parts.|

47. In the first chapter of this romance Cervantes, with a few strokes of a great master, sets before us the pauper gentleman, an early riser and keen sportsman, who, “when he was idle, which was most part of the year,” gave himself up to reading books of chivalry till he lost his wits. The events that follow are in every one’s recollection; his lunacy consists, no doubt, only in one idea; but this is so absorbing that it perverts the evidence of his senses, and predominates in all his language. It is to be observed, therefore, in relation to the nobleness of soul ascribed to Don Quixote, that every sentiment he utters is borrowed with a punctilious rigour from the romances of his library; he resorts to them on every occasion for precedents; if he is intrepidly brave, it is because his madness and vanity have made him believe himself unconquerable; if he bestows kingdoms, it is because Amadis would have done the same; if he is honourable, courteous, a redresser of wrongs, it is in pursuance of these prototypes, from whom, except that he seems rather more scrupulous in chastity, it is his only boast not to diverge. Those who talk of the exalted character of Don Quixote, seem really to forget that, on these subjects, he has no character at all; he is the echo of romance; and to praise him is merely to say, that the tone of chivalry, which these productions studied to keep up, and, in the hands of inferior artists, foolishly exaggerated, was full of moral dignity, and has, in a subdued degree of force, modelled the character of a man of honour in the present day. But throughout the first two volumes of Don Quixote, though in a few unimportant passages he talks rationally, I cannot find more than two in which he displays any other knowledge or strength of mind than the original delineation of the character would lead us to expect.

48. The case is much altered in the last two volumes. Cervantes had acquired an immense popularity, and perceived the opportunity, of which he had already availed himself, that this romance gave for displaying his own mind. He had become attached to a hero who had made him illustrious, and suffered himself to lose sight of the clear outline he had once traced for Quixote’s personality. Hence, we find in all this second part that, although the lunacy as to knights errant remains unabated, he is, on all other subjects, not only rational in the low sense of the word, but clear, acute, profound, sarcastic, coolheaded. His philosophy is elevated but not enthusiastic, his imagination is poetical, but it is restrained by strong sense. There are, in fact, two Don Quixotes; one, whom Cervantes first designed to draw, the foolish gentleman of La Mancha, whose foolishness had made him frantic; the other, a highly gifted, accomplished model of the best chivalry, trained in all the court, the camp, or the college could impart, but scathed in one portion of his mind by an inexplicable visitation of monomania. One is inclined to ask why this Don Quixote, who is Cervantes, should have been more likely to lose his intellects by reading romances than Cervantes himself. As a matter of bodily disease, such an event is doubtless possible; but nothing can be conceived more improper for fiction, nothing more incapable of affording a moral lesson than the insanity which arises wholly from disease. Insanity is, in no point of view, a theme for ridicule; and this is an inherent fault of the romance (for those who have imagined that Cervantes has not rendered Quixote ridiculous have a strange notion of the word); but the thoughtlessness of mankind, rather than their insensibility, for they do not connect madness with misery, furnishes some apology for the first two volumes. In proportion as we perceive below the veil of mental delusion a noble intellect, we feel a painful sympathy with its humiliation; the character becomes more complicated and interesting, but has less truth and naturalness; an objection which might also be made, comparatively speaking, to the incidents in the latter volumes, wherein I do not find the admirable probability that reigns through the former. But this contrast of wisdom and virtue with insanity in the same subject would have been repulsive in the primary delineation; as I think any one may judge by supposing that Cervantes had, in the first chapter, drawn such a picture of Quixote as Bouterwek and Sismondi have drawn for him.

49. I must, therefore, venture to think as, I believe, the world has generally thought for two centuries, that Cervantes had no more profound aim than he proposes to the reader. If the fashion of reading bad romances of chivalry perverted the taste of his contemporaries, and rendered their language ridiculous, it was natural that a zealous lover of good literature should expose this folly to the world by exaggerating its effects on a fictitious personage. It has been said by some modern writer, though I cannot remember by whom, that there was a _prose side_ in the mind of Cervantes. There was indeed a side of calm strong sense, which some take for unpoetical. He thought the tone of those romances extravagant. It might naturally occur how absurd any one must appear who should attempt to realize in actual life the adventures of Amadis. Already a novelist, he perceived the opportunities this idea suggested. It was a necessary consequence that the hero must be represented as literally insane, since his conduct would have been extravagant beyond the probability of fiction on any other hypothesis; and from this happy conception germinated in a very prolific mind the whole history of Don Quixote. Its simplicity is perfect; no limit could be found save the author’s discretion, or sense that he had drawn sufficiently on his imagination; but the death of Quixote, which Cervantes has been said to have determined upon, lest some one else should a second time presume to continue the story, is, in fact, the only possible termination that could be given, after he had elevated the character to that pitch of mental dignity which we find in the last two volumes.

|Excellence of this romance.|

50. Few books of moral philosophy display as deep an insight into the mechanism of the mind as Don Quixote. And when we look also at the fertility of invention, the general probability of the events, and the great simplicity of the story, wherein no artifices are practised to create suspense, or complicate the action, we shall think Cervantes fully deserving of the glory that attends this monument of his genius. It is not merely that he is superior to all his predecessors and contemporaries. This, though it might account for the European fame of his romance, would be an inadequate testimony to its desert. Cervantes stands on an eminence below which we must place the best of his successors. We have only to compare him with Le Sage or Fielding, to judge of his vast superiority. To Scott indeed he must yield in the variety of his power; but in the line of comic romance, we should hardly think Scott his equal.

|Minor novels of Cervantes.|

|Other novels--Spanish.|

|And Italian.|

51. The moral novels of Cervantes, as he calls them (Novellas Exemplares), are written, I believe, in a good style, but too short, and constructed with too little artifice to rivet our interest. Their simplicity and truth, as in many of the old novels, have a certain charm; but in the present age, our sense of satiety in works of fiction cannot be overcome but by excellence. Of the Spanish comic romances, in the _picaresque_ style, several remain: Justina was the most famous. One that does not strictly belong to this lower class is the Marcos de Obregon of Espinel. This is supposed to have suggested much to Le Sage in Gil Bias; in fact, the first story we meet with is that of Mergellina the physician’s wife. The style, though not dull, wants the grace and neatness of Le Sage. This is esteemed one of the best novels that Spain has produced. Italy was no longer the seat of this literature. A romance of chivalry by Marini (not the poet of that name), entitled Il Caloandro (1640), was translated but indifferently into French by Scuderi, and has been praised by Salfi as full of imagination, with characters skilfully diversified, and an interesting well-conducted story.[589]

[589] Salfi, vol. xiv., p. 88.

|French romances--Astrée.|

52. France, in the sixteenth century, content with Amadis de Gaul and the numerous romances of the Spanish school, had contributed very little to that literature. But now she had native writers of both kinds, the pastoral and heroic, who completely superseded the models they had before them. Their earliest essay was the Astrée of D’Urfé. Of this pastoral romance the first volume was published in 1610; the second in 1620; three more came slowly forth, that the world might have due leisure to admire. It contains about 3,500 pages. It would be almost as discreditable to have read such a book through at present, as it was to be ignorant of it in the age of Louis XIII. Allusions, however, to real circumstances served in some measure to lessen the insipidity of a love-story, which seems to equal any in absurdity and want of interest. The style, and I can judge no farther, having read but a few pages, seems easy and not unpleasing; but the pastoral tone is insufferably puerile, and a monotonous solemnity makes us almost suspect that one source of its popularity was its gentle effect, when read in small portions before retiring to rest. It was, nevertheless, admired by men of erudition, like Camus and Huet, or even by men of the world like Rochefoucault.[590]

[590] Dunlop’s History of Fiction, vol. iii., p. 184. Biographie Universelle. Bouterwek, vol. v., p. 295.

|Heroic romances--Gomberville.|

53. From the union of the old chivalrous romance with this newer style, the courtly pastoral, sprang another kind of notion, the French heroic romance. Three nearly contemporary writers, Gomberville, Calprenède, Scuderi, supplied a number of voluminous stories, frequently historical in some of their names, but utterly destitute of truth in circumstances, characters, and manners. Gomberville led the way in his Polexandre, first published in 1632, and reaching in later editions to about 6,000 pages. “This,” says a modern writer, “seems to have been the model of the works of Calprenède and Scuderi. This ponderous work may be regarded as a sort of intermediate production between the later compositions and the ancient fables of chivalry. It has, indeed, a close affinity to the heroic romance; but many of the exploits of the hero are as extravagant as those of a paladin or knight of the round table.”[591] No romance in the language has so complex an intrigue, insomuch that it is followed with difficulty; and the author has in successive editions capriciously remodelled parts of his story, which is wholly of his own invention.[592]

[591] Dunlop, iii., 230.

[592] Biog. Univ.

|Calprenède.|

54. Calprenède, a poet of no contemptible powers of imagination, poured forth his stores of rapid invention in several romances more celebrated than that of Gomberville. The first, which is contained in ten octavo volumes, is the Cassandra. This appeared in 1642, and was followed by the Cleopatra, published, according to the custom of romancers, in successive parts, the earliest in 1646. La Harpe thinks this unquestionably the best work of Calprenède; Bouterwek seems to prefer the Cassandra. Pharamond is not wholly his own; five out of twelve volumes belong to one De Vaumorière, a continuator.[593] Calprenède, like many others, had but a life-estate in the temple of fame, and more happy, perhaps, than greater men, lived out the whole favour of the world, which, having been largely showered on his head, strewed no memorials on his grave. It became, soon after his death, through the satire of Boileau and the influence of a new style in fiction, a matter of course to turn him into ridicule. It is impossible that his romances should be read again; but those who, for the purposes of general criticism, have gone back to these volumes, find not a little to praise in his genius, and in some measure to explain his popularity. “Calprenède,” says Bouterwek, “belonged to the extravagant party, which endeavoured to give a triumph to genius at the expense of taste, and by that very means played into the hands of the opposite party, which saw nothing so laudable as the observation of the rules which taste prescribed. We have only to become acquainted with any one of the prolix romances of Calprenède, such, for instance, as the Cassandra, to see clearly the spirit which animates the whole invention. We find there again the heroism of chivalry, the enthusiastic raptures of love, the struggle of duty with passion, the victory of magnanimity, sincerity, and humanity over force, fraud, and barbarism, in the genuine characters and circumstances of romance. The events are skilfully interwoven, and a truly poetical keeping belongs to the whole, however extended it may be. The diction of Calprenède is a little monotonous, but not at all trivial, and seldom affected. It is like that of old romance, grave, circumstantial, somewhat in the chronicle style, but picturesque, agreeable, full of sensibility and simplicity. Many passages might, if versified, find a place in the most beautiful poem of this class.”[594]

[593] Dunlop, iii., 259.

[594] Bouterwek, vi., 230.

|Scuderi.|

55. The honours of this romantic literature have long been shared by the female sex. In the age of Richelieu and Mazarin, this was represented by Mademoiselle de Scuderi, a name very glorious for a season, but which unfortunately did not, like that of Calprenède, continue to be such during the whole lifetime of her who bore it. The old age of Mademoiselle de Scuderi was ignominiously treated by the pitiless Boileau; and reaching more than her ninetieth year, she almost survived her only offspring, those of her pen. In her youth she had been the associate of the Rambouillet circle, and caught, perhaps, in some measure from them, what she gave back with interest, a tone of perpetual affectation and a pedantic gallantry, which could not withstand the first approach of ridicule. Her first romance was Ibrahim, published in 1635; but the more celebrated were the Grand Cyrus and the Clelie. Each of these two romances is in ten volumes.[595] The persons chiefly connected with the Hotel Rambouillet sat for their pictures, as Persians or Babylonians, in Cyrus. Julie d’Angennes herself bore the name of Artenice, by which she was afterwards distinguished among her friends; and it is a remarkable instance not only of the popularity of these romances, but of the respectful sentiment, which, from the elevation and purity no one can deny them to exhibit, was always associated in the gravest persons with their fictions, that a prelate of eminent taste and eloquence, Fléchier, in his funeral sermon on this lady, calls her “the incomparable Artenice.”[596] Such an allusion would appear to us misplaced; but we may presume that it was not so thought. Scuderi’s romances seem to have been remarkably the favourites of the clergy; Huet, Mascaron, Godeau, as much as Fléchier, were her ardent admirers. “I find,” says the second of these, one of the chief ornaments of the French pulpit, in writing to Mademoiselle de Scuderi, “so much in your works calculated to reform the world, that in the sermons I am now preparing for the court, you will often be on my table by the side of St. Augustin and St. Bernard.”[597] In the writings of this lady we see the last footstep of the old chivalrous romance. She, like Calprenède, had derived from this source the predominant characteristics of her personages, an exalted generosity, a disdain of all selfish considerations, a courage which attempts impossibilities and is rewarded by achieving them, a love outrageously hyperbolical in pretence, yet intrinsically without passion, all, in short, that Cervantes has bestowed on Don Quixote. Love, however, or its counterfeit, gallantry, plays a still more leading part in the French romance than in its Castilian prototype; the feats of heroes, though not less wonderful, are less prominent on the canvas, and a metaphysical pedantry replaces the pompous metaphors in which the knight of sorrowful countenance had taken so much delight. The approbation of many persons, far better judges than Don Quixote, makes it impossible to doubt that the romances of Calprenède and Scuderi were better than his library. But as this is the least possible praise, it will certainly not tempt any one away from the rich and varied repast of fiction which the last and present century have spread before him. Mademoiselle de Scuderi has perverted history still more than Calprenède, and changed her Romans into languishing Parisians. It is not to be forgotten that the taste of her party, though it did not, properly speaking, infect Corneille, compelled him to weaken some of his tragedies. And this must be the justification of Boileau’s cutting ridicule upon this truly estimable woman. She had certainly kept up a tone of severe and high morality, with which the aristocracy of Paris could ill dispense; but it was one not difficult to feign, and there might be Tartuffes of sentiment as well as of religion. Whatever is false in taste is apt to be allied to what is insincere in character.

[595] Biogr. Univ. Dunlop. Bouterwek.

[596] Sermons de Fléchier, ii., 825 (edit. 1690). But probably Bossuet would not have stooped to this allusion.

[597] Biogr. Univ. Mademoiselle de Scuderi was not gifted by nature with beauty, or, as this biographer more bluntly says, étoit d’un extrême laideur. She would, probably, have wished this to have been otherwise, but carried off the matter very well, as appears by her epigram on her own picture by Nanteuil: Nanteuil, en faisant mon image, A de son art divin signalé le pouvoir; Je hais mes yeux dans mon miroir, Je les aime dans son ouvrage.

|Argenis of Barclay.|

|His Euphormio.|

56. The Argenis of Barclay, a son of the defender of royal authority against republican theories, is a Latin romance, superior to those which the Spanish or French language could boast. It has indeed always been reckoned among political allegories. That the state of France, in the last years of Henry III., is partially shadowed in it, can admit of no doubt; several characters are faintly veiled, either by anagram or Greek translation of their names; but whether to avoid the insipidity of servile allegory, or to excite the reader by perplexity, Barclay has mingled so much of mere fiction with his story, that no attempts at a regular key to the whole work can be successful, nor in fact does the fable of this romance run in any parallel stream with real events. His object seems in great measure to have been the discussion of political questions in feigned dialogue. But though in these we find no want of acuteness or good sense, they have not at present much novelty in our eyes; and though the style is really pleasing, or, as some have judged, excellent,[598] and the incidents not ill contrived, it might be hard to go entirely through a Latin romance of 700 pages, unless, indeed, we had no alternative given but the perusal of the similar works in Spanish or French. The Argenis was published at Rome in 1622; some of the personages introduced by Barclay are his own contemporaries; a proof that he did not intend a strictly historical allegory of the events of the last age. The Euphormio of the same author resembles in some degree the Argenis but, with less of story and character, has a more direct reference to European politics. It contains much political disquisition, and one whole book is employed in a description of the manners and laws of different countries with no disguise of names.

[598] Coleridge has pronounced an ardent, and rather excessive, eulogy on the language of the Argenis, preferring it to that of Livy or Tacitus. Coleridge’s Remains, vol. i., p. 257. I cannot by any means go this length; it has struck me that the Latinity is more that of Petronius Arbiter, but I am not well enough acquainted with this writer to speak confidently. The same observation seems applicable to the Euphormio.

|Campanella’s City of the Sun.|

57. Campanella gave a loose to his fanciful humour in a fiction, entitled the City of the Sun, published at Frankfort in 1623, in imitation perhaps of the Utopia. The City of the Sun is supposed to stand upon a mountain situated in Ceylon, under the equator. A community of goods and women is established in this republic; the principal magistrate of which is styled Sun, and is elected after a strict examination in all kinds of science. Campanella has brought in so much of his own philosophical system, that we may presume that to have been the object of this romance. The Solars, he tells us, abstained at first from flesh, because they thought it cruel to kill animals. “But afterwards considering that it would be equally cruel to kill plants, which are not less endowed with sensation, so that they must perish by famine, they understood that ignoble things were created for the use of nobler things, and now eat all things without scruple.” Another Latin romance had some celebrity in its day, the Monarchia Solipsorum, a satire on the Jesuits in the fictitious name of Lucius Cornelius Europeus. It has been ascribed to more than one person; the probable author is one Scotti, who had himself belonged to the order.[599] This book did not seem to me in the least interesting; if it is so in any degree, it must be not as mere fiction, but as a revelation of secrets.

[599] Biogr. Univ. arts. Scotti and Inchoffer. Niceron, vols. xxxv. and xxxix.

|Few books of fiction in England.|

58. It is not so much an extraordinary as an unfortunate deficiency in our own literary annals, that England should have been destitute of the comic romance, or that derived from real life, to a late period; since in fact we may say the same, as has been seen, of France. The picaresque novels of Spain were thought well worthy of translation; but it occurred to no one, or no one had the gift of genius, to shift the scene, and imitate their delineation of native manners. Of how much value would have been a genuine English novel, the mirror of actual life in the various ranks of society, written under Elizabeth or under the Stuarts! We should have seen, if the execution had not been very coarse, and the delineation absolutely confined to low characters, the social habits of our forefathers better than by all our other sources of that knowledge, the plays, the letters, the traditions and anecdotes, the pictures or buildings of the time. Notwithstanding the interest all profess to take in the history of manners, our notions of them are generally meagre and imperfect; and hence, modern works of fiction are but crude and inaccurate designs when they endeavour to represent the living England of two centuries since. Even Scott, who had a fine instinctive perception of truth and nature, and who had read much, does not appear to have seized the genuine tone of conversation, and to have been a little misled by the style of Shakspeare. This is rather elaborate and removed from vulgar use by a sort of archaism in phrase and a pointed turn in the dialogue, adapted to theatrical utterance, but wanting the ease of ordinary speech.

|Mundus Alter et Idem of Hall.|

59. I can only produce two books by English authors in this first part of the seventeenth century which fall properly under the class of novels or romances; and of these one is written in Latin. This is the Mundus Alter et Idem of Bishop Hall, an imitation of the later and weaker volumes of Rabelais. A country in Terra Australis is divided into four regions, Crapulia, Viraginia, Moronea, and Lavernia. Maps of the whole land and of particular regions are given; and the nature of the satire, not much of which has any especial reference to England, may easily be collected. It is not a very successful effort.

|Godwin’s Journey to the Moon.|

60. Another prelate, or one who became such, Francis Godwin, was the author of a much more curious story. It is called the Man in the Moon, and relates the journey of one Domingo Gonzalez to that planet. This was written by Godwin, according to Antony Wood, while he was a student at Oxford.[600] By some internal proofs, it must have been later than 1599, and before the death of Elizabeth in 1603. But it was not published till 1638. It was translated into French, and became the model of Cyrano de Bergerac, as he was of Swift. Godwin himself had no prototype, as far as I know, but Lucian. He resembles those writers in the natural and veracious tone of his lays. The fiction is rather ingenious and amusing throughout; but the most remarkable part is the happy conjectures, if we must say no more, of his philosophy. Not only does the writer declare positively for the Copernican system, which was uncommon at that time, but he has surprisingly understood the principle of gravitation, it being distinctly supposed that the earth’s attraction diminishes with the distance. Nor is the following passage less curious. “I must let you understand that the globe of the moon is not altogether destitute of an attractive power; but it is far weaker than that of the earth; as, if a man do but spring upwards with all his force, as dancers do when they show their activity by capering, he shall be able to mount fifty or sixty feet high, and then he is quite beyond all attraction of the moon.” By this device Gonzalez returns from his sojourn in the latter, though it required a more complex device to bring him thither. “The moon,” he observes, “is covered with a sea, except the parts which seem somewhat darker to us, and are dry land.” A contrary hypothesis came afterwards to prevail; but we must not expect everything from our ingenious young student.

[600] Athenæ Oxonienses, vol. ii., col. 558. It is remarkable that Mr. Dunlop has been ignorant of Godwin’s claim to this work, and takes Dominic Gonzalez for the real author. Hist. of Fiction, iii. 394.

|Howell’s Dodona’s Grove.|

61. Though I can mention nothing else in English which comes exactly within our notions of a romance, we may advert to the Dodona’s Grove of James Howell. This is a strange allegory, without any ingenuity in maintaining the analogy between the outer and inner story, which alone can give a reader any pleasure in allegorical writing. The subject is the state of Europe, especially of England, about 1640, under the guise of animated trees in a forest. The style is like the following:--“The next morning the royal olive sent some prime elms to attend prince Rocolino in quality of officers of state; and a little after he was brought to the royal palace in the same state Elaiana’s kings used to be attended the day of their coronation.” The contrivance is all along so clumsy and unintelligible, the invention so poor and absurd, the story, if story there be, so dull an echo of well-known events, that it is impossible to reckon Dodona’s Grove anything but an entire failure. Howell has no wit, but he has abundance of conceits, flat and common-place enough. With all this he was a man of some sense and observation. His letters are entertaining, but they scarcely deserve consideration in this volume.

|Adventures of Baron de Fæneste.|

62. It is very possible that some small works belonging to this extensive class have been omitted, which my readers, or myself, on second consideration, might think not unworthy of notice. It is also one so miscellaneous that we might fairly doubt as to some which have a certain claim to be admitted into it. Such are the Adventures of the Baron de Fæneste, by the famous Agrippa d’Aubigné (whose autobiography, by the way, has at least the liveliness of fiction); a singular book written in dialogue, where an imaginary Gascon baron recounts his tales of the camp and the court. He is made to speak a patois not quite easy for us to understand, and not perhaps worth the while; but it seems to contain much that illustrates the state of France about the beginning of the seventeenth century. Much in this book is satirical; and the satire falls on the Catholics, whom Fæneste, a mere foolish gentleman of Gascony, is made to defend against an acute Hugonot.