Part 24

It was now that several events of European importance combined to stimulate life and enlarge the mental horizon--the invention of printing, or rather of movable types, the promulgation of the Copernican system of astronomy, the discovery of America, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. The Renaissance spread from Florence to England by means of such men as Colet, Linacre, Erasmus, and Sir Thomas More (1480-1535), the last noteworthy as at the head of a new race of historians. Important contributions to the prose of the time were the Tyndale _New Testament_, printed in 1525, and the Coverdale _Bible_ (1535). The first signs of an artistic advance in poetic literature are to be found in Wyatt (1503-42) and Surrey (1516-47), who nationalized the sonnet; Surrey was also a pioneer in the use of blank verse. The drama, too, had by this time reached a fairly high stage of development. The mystery and miracle plays, after the adoption of the vernacular in the fourteenth century, passed from the hands of the clergy into those of the laity, and both stage and drama underwent a rapid secularization. The morality began to embody matters of religious and political controversy, historical characters mingled with the personification of abstract qualities, real characters from contemporary life were introduced, and at length farces on the French model were constructed, the _Interludes_ of John Heywood (died 1565) being the most important examples. To Nicholas Udall (1504-56) the first genuine comedy, _Ralph Roister Doister_, was due, this being shortly afterwards followed by John Still's _Gammer Gurton's Needle_ (1566). The first tragedy, the _Ferrex and Porrex_, or _Gorboduc_ of Sackville (died 1608) and Norton (died 1600), was performed in 1561, and the first prose play, the _Supposes_ of Gascoigne (died 1577) in 1566. Gascoigne and Sackville were noteworthy amongst the earlier Elizabethans apart from their plays; but the figures which bulk most largely are those of Sidney (1554-86) and Spenser (1552-99). In drama Lyly, Peele, Greene, Nash, and Marlowe (1564-93) are the chief immediate precursors of Shakespeare (1564-1616), Marlowe alone, however, being at all comparable with the great master. Contemporary and later dramatic writers were Ben Jonson (1573-1637), the second great Elizabethan dramatist, Middleton (died 1627), Marston (better known as a satirist), Chapman (1557-1634), Thomas Heywood, Dekker (died 1639), Webster (seventeenth century), Ford (1586-1639), Beaumont (1586-1616) and Fletcher (1576-1625), and Massinger (1584-1640). The minor poets include Michael Drayton (1563-1631), Samuel Daniel (1562-1619), John Davies (1570-1626), John Donne (1573-1631), Giles Fletcher (1580-1623), and Phineas Fletcher (1584-1650), Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). In Elizabethan prose the prominent names are those of Roger Ascham (1515-68), John Lyly (1553-1606), Hooker (1554-1600), Raleigh (1552-1618), Bacon (1561-1626), the founder in some regards of modern scientific method, Burton (1576-1640), Herbert of Cherbury (1581-1648), and Selden (1584-1654), with Overbury, Knolles, Holinshed, Stowe, Camden, Florio, and North. The issue of the Authorized Version of the Bible in 1611 may be said to close the prose list of the period, as it represents the finest flower of English prose.

After the death of James I the course of literature breaks up into three stages, the first from 1625 to 1640, in which the survivals from the Elizabethan Age slowly die away. The 'metaphysical poets', Cowley, Wither, Herbert, Crashaw, Habbington, and Quarles, and the cavalier poets, Suckling, Carew, Denham, all published poems before the close of this period, in which also Milton's early poems were composed, and the _Comus_ and _Lycidas_ published. The second stage (1640-60) was almost wholly given up to controversial prose, the Puritan revolution checking the production of pure literature. In this controversial prose of the time Milton was easily chief. With the Restoration a third stage was begun. Milton turned his new leisure to the composition of his great poems; the drama was revived, and Davenant and Dryden, with Otway, Southerne, Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar in their first plays, and minor playwrights, are the most representative writers of the period. Butler established a genre in satire, and Marvell as a satirist in some respects anticipated Swift; Roscommon, Rochester, and Dorset contributed to the little poetry; while in prose we have Hobbes, Clarendon, Fuller, Sir Thomas Browne, Walton, Cotton, Pepys and Evelyn, John Bunyan, Locke, Sir William Temple, Owen Feltham, Sir Henry Wotton, James Harrington, and a crowd of theological writers, of whom the best known are Jeremy Taylor, Richard Baxter, Robert Barclay, William Penn, George Fox, Isaac Barrow, John Tillotson, Stillingfleet, Bishop Pearson, Sherlock, South, Sprat, Cudworth, and Burnet. Other features of the last part of the seventeenth century were the immense advance in physical science under Boyle, Isaac Newton, Harvey, and others, and the rise of the newspaper press.

Dryden's death in 1700 marks the commencement of the so-called Augustan Age in English literature. During it, however, no greater poet appeared than Pope (1688-1744), in whom sagacity, wit, and fancy take the place of the highest poetic faculty, but who was a supreme artist within the formal limits of his conception of the art of poetry. Against these formal limits signs of reaction are apparent in the verse of Thomson (1700-48), Gray (1716-71), Collins (1720-59), Goldsmith (1728-74), and in the productions of Macpherson and Chatterton. The poets Prior (1664-1721), Gay (1688-1732), and Ambrose Phillips (1671-1749) inherit from the later seventeenth century, Gay being memorable in connection with English opera; and there are many minor poets--Garth, John Philips, Blackmore, Parnell, Dyer, Somerville, Green, Shenstone, Blair, Akenside, Falconer, Anstey, Beattie, Allan Ramsay, and Robert Fergusson. It is in prose that the chief development of the eighteenth century is to be found. Defoe (1661-1731) and Swift (1667-1745) led the way in fiction and prose satire; Steele (1672-1729) and Addison (1672-1719), working on a suggestion of Defoe, established the periodical essay; Richardson (1689-1761), Fielding (1707-54), Smollett (1721-71), and Sterne raised the novel to sudden perfection. Goldsmith also falls into the fictional group as well as into that of the poets and of the essayists. Johnson (1709-84) exercised during the latter part of his life the power of a literary dictator, with Boswell (1740-95) as his 'Secretary of State'. The other chief prose writers were Bishop Berkeley (1685-1753), Arbuthnot (1675-1735), Shaftesbury (1671-1713), Bolingbroke (1678-1751), Burke, the historians David Hume (1711-76), William Robertson (1721-93), Edward Gibbon (1737-94); the political writers Wilkes and 'Junius', the economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith (1723-90); the philosophical writers Hume, Bentham (1749-1832), and Dugald Stewart (1753-1828); the scholars Bentley (1662-1742), Sir William Jones (1746-94), and Richard Porson (1759-1808); the theologians Atterbury, Butler (1692-1752), Warburton, and Paley; and some playwrights, of whom the most important was Sheridan, but who also included Rowe, John Home, Colley Cibber, Colman the elder, and Foote.

With the French Revolution, or a few years earlier, the modern movement in literature may be said to have commenced. The departure from the old traditions, traceable in Gray and Collins, was more clearly exhibited in the last years of the century in Cowper (1731-1800) and Burns (1759-96), and was developed and perfected in the hands of Blake (1757-1828), Bowles (1762-1850), and the 'Lake poets' Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834), and Southey (1774-1843); but there were at first many survivals from the poetic manner of the seventeenth century, such as Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), Dr. John Wolcot (1738-1819), and Samuel Rogers (1763-1855). Amongst the earlier poets of the nineteenth century, also, were George Crabbe (1754-1832), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), Hogg (1772-1835), Campbell (1777-1844), James Montgomery, Mrs. Hemans, Bryan Waller Procter ('Barry Cornwall'), Joanna Baillie, Robert Montgomery. A more important group was that of Byron (1788-1824), Shelley (1792-1822), and Keats (1796-1821), with which may be associated the names of Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), Thomas Moore (1779-1852), and Landor (1775-1864). Among the earlier writers of fiction there were several women of note, such as Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) and Jane Austen (1775-1817). The greatest name in fiction is unquestionably that of Scott. Other prose writers were Malthus, Hallam, James Mill, Southey, Hannah More, Cobbett, William Hazlitt, Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, Lord Brougham. In the literature since 1830 poetry has included as its chief names those of Praed, Hood, Sidney Dobell, Gerald Massey, Charles Mackay, Philip James Bailey, William Allingham, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Coventry Patmore, the second Lord Lytton ('Owen Meredith'), Arthur Hugh Clough, Matthew Arnold, Dante G. Rossetti, Robert Buchanan, Wm. Morris, Lewis Morris, Jean Ingelow, Swinburne, and last and greatest, Tennyson and Browning. Among more modern English poets are Stephen Phillips (1868-1915), Francis Thompson (1860-1907), Sir William Watson (born 1858), John Davidson (1857-1909), and R. Kipling (born 1865). A brilliant list of nineteenth-century novelists includes Marryat, Michael Scott, the first Lord Lytton, Ainsworth, Benjamin Disraeli (Earl of Beaconsfield), Dickens, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, Charlotte Bronte, Lover, Lever, Wilkie Collins, Mayne Reid, Charles Reade, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, William Black, Thomas Hardy, R. D. Blackmore, George Meredith, R. L. Stevenson, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Craik (Miss Mulock), Mrs. Oliphant, Miss Yonge, and others. Towards the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century there was a deepening interest in the drama, and the list of brilliant dramatists includes the names of Barrie, H. A. Jones, G. B. Shaw, Pinero, Granville Barker, and others. The tendency in the fiction of the twentieth century is a concrete and imaginative presentation of the social, ethical, and sentimental problems of the day. This tendency is clearly seen in the novels of John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells. To the historical and biographical list of the nineteenth century belong Macaulay, Buckle, Carlyle, Thirwall, Grote, Milman, Froude, Lecky, S. R. Gardiner, Kinglake, John Richard Green, E. A. Freeman, Stubbs, Dean Stanley, John Morley, Leslie Stephen. In science and philosophy among the chief writers of the nineteenth century have been Whewell, Sir W. Hamilton, Mansel, John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, Hugh Miller, Charles Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Max M[:u]ller, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Green.--BIBLIOGRAPHY: _Cambridge History of English Literature_; Taine, _History of English Literature_; Saintsbury, _Short History of English Literature_; Chambers, _Cyclopaedia of English Literature_.

ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE, ART, CHURCH, LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, &c. See _England_.

ENGLISH CHANNEL (Fr. _La Manche_, the sleeve), the arm of the sea which separates England from France, extending, on the English side, from Dover to Land's End; and on the French, from Calais to the Island of Ushant. On the east it communicates with the North Sea by the Straits of Dover, 21 miles wide; and on the west it opens into the Atlantic by an entrance about 100 miles wide. At its greatest breadth it is about 150 miles. The pilchard and mackerel fisheries are very important. The advantages of a railway tunnel under the Channel at or near its narrowest part have been frequently urged; and an English company, formed in 1887 for constructing a tunnel from Dover, to meet a similar tunnel starting from near Calais, has pushed an excavation under the sea for over 2000 yards. The plan, opposed by the British Government for military reasons in 1907, has now been approved of. Plans have also been put forward for a railway bridge across the Straits of Dover.

ENGRAVING, the art of drawing or writing on metal, wood, precious stones, &c., by means of incisions made with instruments variously adapted to the substances operated upon and the description of work intended. The term is also applied to the work so performed, and to impressions taken on paper or similar material from the engraved work. Impressions from metal plates are called engravings, prints, or plates; those printed from wood being termed indifferently wood engravings or wood-cuts. While, however, these impressions are not altogether dissimilar in appearance, the processes are distinct. As a rule, in prints from metal the lines intended to print are incised, and in order to take an impression the plate is daubed over with a thick ink which fills all the lines. The surface is then wiped perfectly clean, leaving only the incised lines filled with ink. A piece of damp paper is then laid on the face of the plate, and both are passed through the press, which causes the ink to pass from the plate to the paper. This operation needs to be repeated for every impression. In the wood block, on the contrary, the spaces between the lines of the drawing are cut out, leaving the lines standing up like type, the printing being from the inked surface of the raised lines, and effected much more rapidly than plate printing. This process has also been used to a certain extent with metal.

Engraving on wood, intended for printing or impressing from, long preceded engraving on metals. The art is of Eastern origin, and at least as early as the tenth century engraving and printing from wood blocks was common in China. We first hear of wood engraving being cultivated in Europe by the Italians and Germans for impressing patterns on textiles, but no paper impressions earlier than the fourteenth century are known. For a hundred years there is small indication of the practice of the art, which was at first confined to the production of block-books, playing-cards, and religious prints. According to Vasari, the art of printing from engraved plates was discovered in Florence by Maso Finiguerra about 1460, but engravings of earlier date are known to exist. Engraving had long been used as a means of decorating armour, metal vessels, &c., the engravers generally securing duplicates of their works before laying in the niello (a species of metallic enamel) by taking casts of them in sulphur, and rubbing the lines with black. The discovery of the practicability of taking impressions upon paper helped the development of engraving upon copper plates for the purpose of printing from. The date of the earliest known niello proof upon paper is 1452. The work of the Florentine engravers, however, was almost at once surpassed in Venice and elsewhere in North Italy by Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506), Girolamo Mocetto, Jacopo de' Barbari, and others. In Marc Antonio Raimondi (1475-1534), who wrought under the guidance of Raphael, and reproduced many of his works, the art reached its highest point of the earlier period, and Rome became the centre of a new school, which included Marco da Ravenna (died 1527), Giulio Bonasone (1531-72), and Agostino de Musis (flourished 1536). In the meantime, in Germany the progress of the art had been not less rapid. Of the oldest school the most important engraver is Martin Schongauer (1420-88). He was, however, surpassed a generation later by Albert D[:u]rer (1471-1528), who excelled both in copper and wood engraving, especially in the latter, and also etched a few plates. Among his most famous contemporaries and successors were Burgkmair and Lucas Cranach. The Dutch and Flemish schools, of which D[:u]rer's contemporary Lucas van Leyden was the head, did much to enlarge the scope of the art, either by paying increased attention to the rendering of light and shade, and the expression of tone and surface quality, as in the case of Cornelius Cort and Bloemart; or by developing freedom and expression of line, as in the case of Goltzius and his pupils. Rubens (1577-1640) influenced engraving through the two Bolswerts, Vorstermann, Pontius, and P. de Jode, who engraved many of his works on a large size. Towards the end of the seventeenth century etching, which had before been rarely used, became more common, and was practised with supreme mastery by Rembrandt (1607-69) and other painters of that period. In France, Noel Garnier founded a school of engraving about the middle of the sixteenth century; but it produced no work of any high distinction until the reign of Louis XIV, when Robert Nanteuil, his follower Gerard Edelinck, and Antoine Masson produced many fine portraits, and Gerard Audran engraved works by Nicolas Poussin and Le Brun. Jacques Callot also produced some admirable etchings. These were followed about the middle of the eighteenth century by Wille (1717-1807), a German resident in Paris, who gave new vitality to a waning art, and by the school of French illustrators. Before the middle of the seventeenth century England produced little noteworthy work, availing herself principally of the work of foreign engravers such as Wenzel Hollar, of whom many took up temporary and even permanent residence. The first English engraver of marked importance was William Hogarth (1697-1764), whose works are distinguished for a power of vivid characterization. Vivares (1712-82), a Frenchman by birth, laid the foundation of the English school of landscape engraving, which was still further developed by William Woollet (1735-85), who was also an excellent engraver of the human figure. In historical engraving a not less remarkable advance was made by Sir Robert Strange (1721-92); and Richard Earlom (1743-1822), Valentine Green, and J. R. Smith produced some admirable works in mezzotint. In succession to these came William Sharp (1746-1824), James Bazire (1730-1802), Bartolozzi (1727-1815), who practised stipple engraving, James Heath, Bromley, Raimbach, and others. The substitution of steel for copper plates (1820-30) gave the power of producing a much larger number of fine impressions, and opened new possibilities for highly finished work. During the closing years of the eighteenth century, line engraving attained a depth of colour and fullness of tone in which earlier works are often deficient, and during the following century it reached a perfectness of finish which it had not previously attained. A picture, whether figure or landscape, came to be translated by line engraving with all its depth of colour, delicacy of tone, and effect of light and shade; the various textures, whether of naked flesh, silk, satin, woollen, or velvet, were all successfully rendered by ingenious modes of laying the lines and combinations of lines of varying strength, width, and depth. At the same time, original work by engravers declined in quality. Among engravers who have produced historical works of large size and in the line manner the names of Raphael Morghen (1758-1833), Longhi (1766-1831), Anderloni (1784-1849), Garavaglia (1790-1835), and Toschi, in Italy; of Forster (1790-1872), Henriquel-Dupont (born 1797), Bridoux (born 1812), and Blanchard (born 1819), in France; of John Burnet (1784-1868), J. H. Robinson (1796-1871), Geo. T. Doo (1800-86), J. H. Watt (1799-1867), and Lumb Stocks (1812-92), in England, stand pre-eminent. Among historical and portrait engravers in the stipple or dotted manner the names of H. T. Ryall, Henry Robinson, William Holl (1807-71), and Francis Holl may be mentioned. In the period 1820-60 landscape engraving attained a perfection in Great Britain which it had not attained in any other country, or at any other time. In fact, most of the work was done by etching, details being sharpened by the graver. Among landscape engravers the names of Geo. Cooke (1781-1834), William Miller (1796-1882), E. Goodall (1795-1870), J. Cousen (1804-80), R. Brandard (1805-62), and Wm. Forrest (born 1805) hold the foremost places. Most of these were associated with the reproduction of Turner's pictures, and owed much to his control and direction. In mezzotint engraving Samuel Cousins (1801-87) and David Lucas, who was associated with John Constable in the 'English Landscape' series, achieved considerable success. In the period 1830-45 various publications called Annuals, composed of light literature in prose and verse, and illustrated by highly finished engravings in steel, were very popular. The engravings were necessarily of small size, and are generally of great excellence. A number of them, both figure and landscape, are executed with such finish and completeness as to be esteemed perfect works. The illustrations of Rogers's _Poems_ and Rogers's _Italy_ after Turner and Stothard belong to this period. Many of the originals of the engravings in the Annuals were finished pictures of large size. A great part of the difficulty in engraving on a small scale from a large picture consists in determining what details can be left out, and still preserve the full effect and character of the original. The most noted engravers for work of this kind are Charles Heath, Charles Rolls, W. Finden, E. Finden, E. Portbury, J. Goodyear, F. Engleheart, Henry le Keux, E. Goodall, and W. Miller. Since 1870 many reproductions of paintings have been produced by means of etching, a comparatively cheap and rapid process. Such works have been fashionable and very popular with collectors. But while some of them have been excellent of their kind, the process is of limited resource, and the best works in this manner do not compare with the masterpieces of line engraving. In original work, however, etching and dry-point (q.v.) have produced some excellent work, notably in the hands of Charles Meryon, J. M. Whistler, Sir Seymour Haden, and Anders Zorn. A revival of mezzotint owes much to Sir Frank Short. Through lack of encouragement, change of fashion, and the adoption of other methods of reproduction, line engraving on metal has become almost a lost art in Great Britain, though a revival in wood engraving has taken place of recent years.

_Line Engraving_, as implied by the term, is executed entirely in lines. The tools are few and simple. They consist of the graver or _burin_, the scraper, to remove the burr left by the graver, and the burnisher; an oil-stone or hone, dividers, a parallel square, a magnifying lens; a bridge on which to rest the hand; a blind or shade of tissue paper, to make the light fall equally on the plate, callipers for levelling important erasures, a small steel anvil, a small pointed hammer, and punches. In etching, the following articles are required: a resinous mixture called etching-ground, capable, when spread very thinly over the plate, of resisting the action of the acids used; a dabber for laying the ground equally; an etching needle; a hand-vice; some brushes of different sizes; and bordering wax, made of burgundy-pitch, bees'-wax, and a little oil.