A History of English Literature - George Saintsbury (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

which are simply worth all the works of Breton, prose and verse, unless we count the Lullaby, put together. In the mots rayonnants, the mots de lumière, he is sadly deficient. But his work (which is nearly as plentiful in verse as in prose) is, as has been said, very interesting to the literary student, because it shows better perhaps than anything else the style of literature which a man, disdaining to condescend to burlesque or bawdry, not gifted with any extraordinary talent, either at prose or verse, but possessed of a certain literary faculty, could then produce with a fair chance of being published and bought. It cannot be said that the result shows great daintiness in Breton's public. The verse, with an improvement in sweetness and fluency, is very much of the doggerel style which was prevalent before Spenser; and the prose, though showing considerable faculty, if not of invention, yet of adroit imitation of previously invented styles, is devoid of distinction and point. There are, however, exercises after Breton's own fashion in almost every popular style of the time—euphuist romances, moral treatises, packets of letters, collections of jests and short tales, purely religious tractates, characters (after the style later illustrated by Overbury and Earle), dialogues, maxims, pictures of manners, collections of notes about foreign countries,—in fact, the whole farrago of the modern periodical. The pervading characteristics are Breton's invariable modesty, his pious and, if I may be permitted to use the word, gentlemanly spirit, and a fashion of writing which, if not very pointed, picturesque, or epigrammatic, is clear, easy, and on the whole rather superior, in observance of the laws of grammar and arrangement, to the work of men of much greater note in his day.

The verse pamphlets of Rowlands (whom I have not studied as thoroughly as most others), Davies, and many less voluminous men, are placed here with all due apology for the liberty. They are seldom or never of much formal merit, but they are interesting, first, because they testify to the hold which the mediæval conception of verse, as a general literary medium as suitable as prose and more attractive, had upon men even at this late time; and secondly, because, like the purely prose pamphlets, they are full of information as to the manners of the time. For Rowlands I may refer to Mr. Gosse's essay. John Davies of Hereford, the writing-master, though he has been carefully edited for students, and is by no means unworthy of study, has had less benefit of exposition to the general reader. He was not a genius, but he is a good example of the rather dull man who, despite the disfavour of circumstance, contrives by much assiduity and ingenious following of models to attain a certain position in literature. There are John Davieses of Hereford in every age, but since the invention and filing of newspapers their individuality has been not a little merged. The anonymous journalist of our days is simply to the historian such and such a paper, volume so-and-so, page so much, column this or that. The good John Davies, living in another age, still stands as nominis umbra, but with a not inconsiderable body of work to throw the shadow.

One of the most remarkable, and certainly one of not the least interesting developments of the Elizabethan pamphlet remains to be noticed. This is the celebrated series of "Martin Marprelate" tracts, with the replies which they called forth. Indeed the popularity of this series may be said to have given a great impulse to the whole pamphleteering system. It is somewhat unfortunate that this interesting subject has never been taken up in full by a dispassionate historian of literature, sufficiently versed in politics and in theology. In mid-nineteenth century most, but by no means all of the more notable tracts were reprinted by John Petheram, a London bookseller, whose productions have since been issued under the well-known imprint of John Russell Smith, the publisher of the Library of Old Authors. This gave occasion to a review in The Christian Remembrancer, afterwards enlarged and printed as a book by Mr. Maskell, a High Churchman who subsequently seceded to the Church of Rome. This latter accident has rather unfavourably and unfairly affected later judgments of his work, which, however, is certainly not free from party bias. It has scarcely been less unlucky that the chief recent dealers with the matter, Professor Arber (who projected a valuable reprint of the whole series in his English Scholars' Library, and who prefaced it with a quite invaluable introductory sketch), and Dr. Grosart, who also included divers Anti-Martinist tracts in his privately printed Works of Nashe, are very strongly prejudiced on the Puritan side.[40] Between these authorities the dispassionate inquirer who attacks the texts for himself is likely to feel somewhat in the position of a man who exposes himself to a cross fire. The Martin Marprelate controversy, looked at without prejudice but with sufficient information, shows itself as a very early example of the reckless violence of private crotcheteers on the one hand, and of the rather considerable unwisdom of the official defenders of order on the other. "Martin's" method was to a certain extent an anticipation of the famous move by which Pascal, fifty years later, "took theology out of the schools into drawing-rooms," except that Martin and his adversaries transferred the venue rather to the tap-room than to the drawing-room. The controversy between the framers of the Church of England in its present state, and the hot gospellers who, with Thomas Cartwright at their head, denied the proposition (not deniable or denied now by any sane and scholarly disputant) that church discipline and government are points left to a great extent undefined in the Scriptures, had gone on for years before Martin appeared. Cartwright and Whitgift had fought, with a certain advantage of warmth and eloquence on Cartwright's side, and with an immense preponderance of logical cogency on Whitgift's. Many minor persons had joined in the