'Often have I dress'd my Queen, And often made her bed; But now I've gotten for my reward 'I charge ye all, ye mariners, Let neither my father nor mother get wit, But that I'm coming hame. 'I charge ye all, ye mariners, That sail upon the sea, Let neither my father nor mother get wit This dog's death I'm to die. 'For if my father and mother got wit, O mickle wad be the gude red blude 'O little did my mother ken, Or the death I was to die!' Professor Child (vol. iii. 382-384) regarded this as 'one of the very latest of the Scottish ballads,' yet 'one of the very best.' Like Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe and Mr Courthope, he thought that it was based on the death of a Mary Hamilton for child-murder, at the court of Peter the Great, in March 1719. Professor Child's later published remarks on the objection of the present writer to this theory are in vol. v. p. 299 (compare Blackwood's Magazine, September 1895, p. 381 et seq). The facts of the Scottish case-an apothecary and a French maid of Mary's being the culprits—are in State Papers (Foreign), Elizabeth, December 21, 1563, p. 637. The apothecary occurs in a variant in the Abbotsford MSS. This could hardly have happened if, for some unknown reason, Our ballad was based, about 1720, on a report of a contemporary event in Russia, and yet accommodated to the circumstances of Mary Stuart's reign. The apothecary is a clear trace of the historical facts of 1563. Professor Child therefore thinks the improbability of the modern date and origin of the ballad 'considerably greater' than the improbability of the chance coincidence of a child-murder by a real Mary Hamilton, a Russian maid of honour. There was no Hamilton among the Queen's Maries, who were Mary Seton, Mary Beaton, Mary Fleming, and Mary Livingstone, and the scandal about one of those ladies, circulated by John Knox, has been disproved by contemporary documents. patched version is selected as classical. extraordinary number of variants, with the Duke of York and the Duke of Argyll introduced as fathers of the heroine, demonstrate the wide circulation, antiquity, and manifold corruption of the ballad. These things do not suit a ballad of 1720 based on a Russian scandal. Scott's The ANDREW LANG. THE CIVIL WAR AND THE COMMONWEALTH. The Puritan Movement. ROM Shakespeare to Miltonfrom Elizabeth to Cromwell --the parallelism of the two changes at once suggests the influence exercised upon literature by the external forces which control the religious and political life of the time. Whatever be the causes which lead to the production of great literature or great art at a given place or time, it may safely be averred that it demands the concurrence of a virile energy, strung to its highest pitch, with the moderating influence of ideas which impose limitations on the worker or the thinker, and preserve the sanity of those who act upon their contemporaries in the world of external achievement as well as in the world of mental conception. It was this combination which, on the one hand, sent forth the members of a single Athenian tribe to fight in one year in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, and on the soil of Greece itself, at a time when the most thorough political revolution had been carried out by constitutional methods unstained by the horrors of civil war; and, on the other hand, manifested itself alike in the counsels of Pericles, the graving-tool of Phidias, and the written word of Sophocles. The Elizabethan age in England showed an energy as intense as that of Athens, displaying itself in a far wider field. With an outlook upon a new world still to be won to the use of civilised mankind, a religion-or rather, more than one religion--claiming not to be national but universal, the nobler Elizabethan found the boundary lines of thought and of moral rectitude pushed forward beyond the limits which had satisfied his ancestors. It is hardly strange that these 'spacious times' gave birth to the greatest of dramatists, who worked, 'not only for an age, but for all time,' and who, whilst he gave with unerring touch vitality to all his characters, limited their action by nothing less than the forces of nature herself, whether acting by external compulsion or by the influence of individual character. Shakespeare's largeness of view was shared by the greatest of his contemporaries. It was on nature and her material laws that Bacon strove to found the new science. It was on nature and her moral laws that Hooker strove to found ecclesiastical peace. One voice, however, in the Elizabethan choir sounded a note apart Shakespeare, Bacon, and Hooker alike deal with men and things as they are. Spenser aimed at depicting men as they ought to be, and it was the Spenserian tradition which was taken up by Milton in his earlier poems. With Milton, from the beginning, it is not the real individual man, acting in harmony with his own nature and controlled by the forces of the extern world, but the individual man idealised looking forth on a world also idealised. So it is with the verses on the deaths of Bishops Andrewes and Felton (1626), with L'Allegro and Il Foseroso (1632?), and with Comus (1634). The last-named poem is especially characteristic of Milton's frame of mind at this period of his life. In it not merely is virtue exalted and vice scorned, but the inward purity of mind is represented, as by Plato and Spenser, as holding sway over the outward appearance: So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity The change in the poet's point of view from Perdita and Miranda to the lady of the Comus is obvious; and it is no less obvious that it is no mere deflection in the stream of literary taste with which we have to reckon. Milton was other than Shakespeare, primarily, of course, because the two men were born dif ferent, but also because the times in which they lived were different. The world was no longer in the Miltonic age a mystery and a wonder. The Western Continent was no longer the home of men whose heads grow beneath their shoulders, but the abode of very prosaic English colonists in Virginia and New England. England no longer confronted the world in arms, but was called on to work out her own domestic problems at home. The world had grown smaller, and the boundary of political action had been drawn closer. Puritanism, which had furnished to the Elizabethan one of the phenomena of which he had to take account, threatened in the reign of Charles to absorb all others. It is unnecessary to argue that Puritanism, conceived as an ecclesiastical system, with its unbending theology and its strict discipline, was hostile to literary effort. No great work was ever inspired by the tone of thought which expressed itself in the Admonition to Parliament or in the Westminster Confession. Even the moral restrictions of Puritanism were too sternly pressed to be congenial to the artistic nature. 'Touch not, taste not, handle not,' seems best answered by the flippant comment, 'Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?' Yet the essence of Puritanism did not lie in its prohibitions but in its aspirations, in its desire to avoid the excess and riot of the world around. It was this, for instance, that imposed on men like Baxter the name of Puritan. Baxter, as he himself tells us, 'never scrupled common prayers or ceremonies, nor spoke against Bishops, nor ever so much as prayed but by a book or form, being not even acquainted then with any that did otherwise; but only for reading Scripture when the rest were dancing on the Lord's Day, and for praying by a form out of the end of the Common Prayer Book-in his house, and for reproving drunkards and swearers, and for talking sometimes a few words of Scripture and the life to come, he was reviled commonly by the name of Puritan, precisian, and hypocrite.' The aims of such men were of necessity individualistic. They sought to strengthen and purify the soul rather than to increase the power of their country or to spread its influence abroad. For such the imposition of the stern Puritan discipline upon the conscience was almost a necessity lest, becoming merely selfcentred, they should loosen the bonds which imposed some check on the divergencies of thought and action and hindered the dissolution of the nation into a thousand hostile sects. Yet, checked as it might be, the sense of individuality was there, and bore with increasing force upon the art as well as upon the mind of Milton. Such a system of thought could not fail to be as repulsive to one order of minds as it was attractive to another. Hostility, not to the moral tendencies but to the intellectual fetters of Puritanism, developed itself amongst scholars at the universities, where the students of Patristic literature were familiarised with thoughts very different from those which inspired Calvinistic theology. The attack on that theology led to a somewhat uncertain progress in the direction of intellectual freedom, whilst those who carried it on sought, in their reverence for external forms of worship, for that fixed order which was accepted by their opponents as residing in the sphere of intellectual belief. The English world was entering on a period of unrest and controversy, and for the first time religious controversy, which had found its way into Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar, left its mark on a truly great poem in Lycidas (1637). The lines in which the Laudian system is attacked can hardly be regarded as enhancing the merits of that splendid verse, yet it must be acknowledged be acknowledged that in introducing them Milton had too fine an artistic sense to take notice of the more prominent subjects under discussion at the time, and contented himself with dwelling on the neglect of duty which he ascribed to a hireling clergy. The highest poetry refused to touch satirically. on such topics as the position of the communion-table or the wearing of the surplice. Yet, on the other side, reverence rendered it possible to touch on them, if only by a tour de force. force. The tendency to subordinate thought to words had shown itself in the quaintness of Donne and Andrewes, and it was but a step further in George Herbert when he subordinated thought to symbolism : Mark you the floor? That square and speckled stone Which looks so firm and strong And th' other black and grave, wherewith each one Is checkered all along, Humility. The gentle rising, which on either hand Leads to the Quire above, Is Confidence: But the sweet cement, which in one sure band Ties the whole frame, is Love And Charity. Such lines appeal to a restricted audience. Later generations find more sympathy with the tolerant spirit of such men as Chillingworth or John Hales, but their writings are too far involved in the special controversies of the day to give them a hold on the universal intelligence of mankind. Sir Thomas Browne, on the other hand, rises into a higher atmosphere, and aims at reconciling faith and thought in words which find an echo in later times. Deleterious as was the effect of controversy on the literature of the time, the individualistic tendency of the day was favourable to the production of work that has lived. The poetry of the second and third quarters of the seventeenth century is remarkable for its panegyrics on individual personages, of which Lycidas furnishes an early and perhaps the best example. The handling of the subject by Milton is as unlike what Shakespeare's would have been as it is possible to be. The personality of Edward King, the hero of the piece, is more than idealised, as it is not in any way brought before our eyes; and the beauty of his character is left to be inferred from its effect upon the mind of the poet, as the beauty of Helen was left to be inferred from the passion it excited. As with Lycidas, so with the sonnets, the controversial and the panegyrical are found in close connection with one another; but fortunately Milton for the most part reserved his most transient contentions for his prose and the more permanent for his poetry. The arguments about the abominations of Episcopacy or the demerits of King Charles-still more, the scurrilous assaults on his literary opponentsfall dead on the ear, whilst the proclamation of the principles of freedom which lighten up the sonnets On the new Forcers of Conscience, To the Lord General Cromwell, or To Sir Henry Vane, is of universal application, and is as fresh now as on the day when they were written. Not, indeed, that Milton kept his higher thoughts always in abeyance when he addressed himself to political or ecclesiastical argument, as is witnessed by many passages which might be selected out of works otherwise scurrilous and forbidding, and especially by the noble Areopagitica, in which reason appears instinct with imagination. The tendency to idealise individuals was not of any sect or party. It is to be found as strongly on the Royalist as on the Parliamentary side— with this difference, that whereas Royalists preferred to make woman the theme of their verse, of her physic more especially by reason charms, the Parliamentarians preferred to de on the heroism and virtue of men. We have to set Carew's: He that loves a rosy cheek Or a coral lip admires, But a smooth and steadfast mind, Lovely cheeks or lips or eyes; or even Herrick's worship of the 'tempestuous petticoat,' against Milton's: Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud pursued, While Darwen stream, with blood of Scots inbrued, And Dunbar field resounds thy praises loud, And Worcester's laureate wreath : yet much remains To conquer still; Peace hath her victories No less renowned than War : new foes arise, Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains. Help us to save free conscience from the paw Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. The echo in the concluding lines, written in 1652, of the scathing attack in the Lycidas, fifteen years before, on those who For their bellies' sake, Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold, shows us Milton unchanging and unchangeable in his belief that it was possible to free the nobler, work of men from earthly complications So too, in 1654, a few months after the establishment of the Protectorate, he strove in his Second Defence of the English People to invest the coming Parliament in the ideal robes which he found suitable to the Protector. The char acter of his appeal to the voters on the eve of a general election is surely unparalleled before or since: 'Unless by true and sincere piety towards God and man,' he tells them. 'not vain and wordy, but efficacious and active, you drive from your souls aï superstitions sprung fron ignorance of true anc solid religion, you will always have those who wil make you their beasts of burden and sit upon your backs and necks; they will put you up for sale as their easily gotten booty, all your victories in war notwithstanding, and make a rich income out of your ignorance and superstition. Unless you expel avarice, ambition, luxury from your minds, aye, and luxurious living also from your families, then the tyrant you thought you had to seek externally in the battlefield you will find in your own home-you will find within yourselves a still harder taskmaster, nay there will sprout daily out of your own vitals a numerous brood of intolerable tyrants. ... Were you fallen into such an abyss of easy self-corruption, no one-not even Cromwell himself, nor a whole host of Brutuses, if they could come to life again, could deliver you if they would, or would deliver you if they could. For why should any one then assert for you the right of free suffrage, or the power of electing whom you will at the Parliament? Is it that you should be able, each of you, to elect in the cities men of your faction, or that person in the boroughs, however unworthy, who may have feasted yourselves most sumptuously or treated the country-people and the boors to the greatest quantity of drink? Then we should have our dignity and value which is shared by none of his contemporaries. In 1655, the year after this appeal was penned, Waller wrote of the external glories of the Protector : The sea's our own; and now all nations greet, With bending sails, each vessel of our fleet; Your power resounds as far as winds can blow, Or swelling sails upon the globe may go ; or, better still, of Oliver's desire to succour others than those under his own government : Whether this portion of the world were rent By the rude ocean from the continent, Or thus created, it was sure designed To be the sacred refuge of mankind. Hither the oppressed shall henceforth resort, Justice to crave and succour at your court, And then your Highness, not for ours alone, But for the world's protector shall be known. So too in Marvell's three panegyrics: the first, An Horatian ode upon Cromwell's return from Ireland, written in 1650, combines a strong ap members of Parliament made for us, not by prudence preciation of Cromwell's intellectual qualities, and authority, but by faction and feeding; we should have vintners and hucksters for city taverns, and graziers and cattle men for the country districts. Should one entrust the Commonwealth to those to whom nobody would entrust a matter of private business? Know that as to be free is the same thing exactly as to be pious, wise, just, temperate, self-providing, abstinent from the property of other people, and, in fine, magnanimous and brave, so to be the opposite of all that is the same thing as being a slave; and by the customary judgment of God, and a thoroughly just law of retribution, it comes to pass that a nation that cannot rule and govern itself, but has surrendered itself in slavery to its own lusts, is surrendered also to other masters whom it does not like, and made a slave not only with its will, but also against its will.' One reads no such election addresses now. For all that, Milton's burning words-a paraphrase of the saying in Comus, 'Love virtue, she alone is free-are not for an age but for all time. The outward vestments of Puritanism were dropping away. The strict theologies of Calvinism were growing less in repute, and those who most firmly advanced the Puritan standard were growing weary of the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty under which its tender years had sheltered themselves. The assurance that constitutions, and, above all, success military and civil, are of small avail to a nation corrupt in heart and self-seeking in its aims is never out of place. It is this which gives to Milton's political verse and to the better part of his prose a whilst retaining the belief that he had tricked Charles to his confusion; the second, The first Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector, written probably in the opening weeks of 1655, is an encomium upon Cromwell's character as well as a defence of his political system; whilst the third, A poem upon the death of his late Highness the Lord Protector, written after Cromwell's death in 1658, treads in Waller's steps, giving honour to the man Who planted England on the Flandrick shore, And stretched our frontier to the Indian ore. It is possible that disappointment at the course taken by popular feeling drove Milton back into more ideal work. Paradise Lost, taken up seriously about the time of the great Protector's death, resumes the burden of Comus. Its central thought is the temptation of a single human soul- -a masculine soul drawn down to its fate by woman's weakness. In Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained we find the theme of temptation successfully resisted, which is, after all, no other than the theme of the triumphant virtue of the lady of the Comus. In the former poem the wiles of an evil-minded woman are defied. In the latter such influences, by the nature of the case, do not enter into consideration. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress we have once more attention called to the struggle of the individual against evil and his escape therefrom; the man painfully emerging-the woman lingering behind and only freeing herself |