tive poems; two of his lyrical fragments were included as by Shakespeare, along with Marlowe's "Come live with me" and other popular strains, in Jaggard's miscellany, The Passionate Pilgrim, which was brought out in 1599. As that Elizabethan nightingale's re-discoverer and editor, Mr. Bullen, remarks: "There are no sweeter lyrics in English poetry than are to be found in Campion's song-books." In the distinctive charm of his lyric, Campion would seem almost to blend the grace and tenderness of Greene with Lyly's wealth of mythological illustration and the artless simplicity (which is often the highest art) of Lodge: in proof of which it might almost suffice to cite such numbers, no longer unfamiliar, as "Come ye pretty false-eyed wanton," "O never to be moved, O beauty unrelenting," and "Shall I come, sweet love, to thee, when the evening beams are set." But Campion was also much more intellectual than the typical lyrists of his time. There is a sardonic note, a premonition of Donne, one might almost say of Heine, in stanzas such as 66 A secret love or two I must confess."

1 Of Thomas Campion hardly anything is known save one or two friendships (Dowland and Nash), and enmities (Barnes and Breton). His Latin Poemata appeared in 1595, but it is for his Airs of 1601 and 1613 that we cherish his memory. He was an excellent scholar, a writer on music, and a "Doctor of Physicke." Carried off, it would seem, by the plague on March 1st, 1620, he was buried in St. Dunstan's; hence a pleasing reference by Edmund Gosse to A. H. Bullen's efforts as rehabilitator of the poet-musician

"Bullen, well done!

Where Campion lies in London-land,
Lulled by the thunders of the Strand,
Screened from the sun,

Surely there must

Now pass some pleasant gleam

Across his music-haunted dream,

Whose brain and lute are dust."

As a supplement to these miscellaneous lyrics may be mentioned the courtly verses of a number of occasional amateurs in metre. Most of them are strictly occasional verses, inasmuch as their celebrity in nearly every case owes something to the circumstance either of the singer or the song. Such poems were Sir Walter Raleigh's reply to Marlowe's "Come live with me," his poem called The Lie, "Go soul, the body's guest," his famous verse "Fain would I climb, yet fear I to fall," or his couplet on the snuff of a candle the night before he died.

Equally famous, incomparably more poetical, are Browne's epigram, or epitaph, on the Countess of

and the romantic lines of the accomplished Sir Henry Wotton on his mistress, the Queen of Bohemia, "You meaner beauties of the night." Contrast is found in the still noted verses of Bacon, "The world's a bubble, and the life of man less than a span," which are hardly poetical at all, and are less essays in metre than metrical essays. Somewhat akin to these in clumsiness are the effusions of Thomas Lord Vaux on the contented mind and the instability of youth. There is more pith in the fancies of Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford, and more still in the early but well-tuned and idly imitated "My mind to me a kingdom is" of Sir Edward Dyer. Fulke Greville, the ill-fated Earl of Essex, and Sir John Harrington, or Harington, the enfant terrible of palace circles, helped to make up the tale of these courtly poets.1

1 On that incomparable Eros of literature, the Elizabethan Song, putting aside the earlier books of Ritson, Bellamy (the glee collector), Chappell and Rimbault, the interest of which is

peculiar to the antiquary, the explorer should have recourse to the Musa Madrigalesca (1837) of Thomas Oliphant, and to Bullen's unrivalled series*: Lyrics and More Lyrics from Elizabethan Song-Books, and Lyrics from Elizabethan Romances; his editions of England's Helicon, Davison's Poetical Rhapsody, and Thomas Campion, and his Love Poems from Song-Books of the Seventeenth Century. He may also consult with profit Schelling's Elizabethan Lyrics* and Carpenter's English Lyrics. For a magisterial exposition on English sonneteering, especially in regard to its close dependence upon French and Italian models, see Elizabethan Sonnets,* ed. Sidney Lee (2 vols. in An English Garner).

CHAPTER VIII

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

"Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show

To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe."-BEN JONSON.

"Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame."-MILTON.

66

66

46

'But Shakespeare's magic could not copy'd be,

Within that circle none durst walk but he."-DRYDEN.

Our myriad-minded Shakespeare."-COLERIDGE.

Shakespeare's mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see."-EMERSON.

Life at Stratford-The player-Early poems-First-fruits— The flowering period-Shakespeare and Scott-Hamlet and the great tragedies-Later years-Bibliographical summaries.

IF the name of Shakespeare had come up before a lordlieutenant or a genealogist during the first thirty years of Elizabeth's reign, it would have been readily identified as that of a large family of small farmers in the midland counties. During the last fifteen years of the same reign. the name (which finds its equivalent in the well-known Italian surname, Crollalanza) was to acquire a celebrity which has given it a unique and almost sacrosanct significance from that day to this. As in the case of so many great men, the place and time of Shakespeare's nativity have been the subjects of much animated discussion, the echoes of which have by no means died away, even at the present day. It is generally believed, however, that Shakespeare was born in a roomy cottage neighbouring the site of

what is now known as "Shakespeare's Birthplace," in Henley Street, Stratford-on-Avon,1 during the second half of April, 1564. His christening is thus entered in Church Latin in the baptismal register of the parish church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford-on-Avon: "1564, April 26th, Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere." Of Shakespeare's father, the said Johannes or John Shakespeare, we strive in vain to get a clear idea, based upon such facts as that he was a chief alderman of his native Stratford, that he married a rich wife, Mary Arden, daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmecote or Wilmcote, and begot a large family, that he apparently had heavy losses, was continually engaged in lawsuits, but continued "merry-cheek'd," and, like Mr. Wilkins Micawber, was invincibly hopeful that something would turn up. John Shakespeare bought the Henley Street property in 1556 and brought his wife home there in the following year. Ten years later he was head bailiff of the town and welcomed the Queen's and other companies of players to Stratford. In 1575 he bought the house familiar to-day as the "Birthplace"; but from 1557 the fortunes of the once prosperous glover began to decline. Every long holiday that the eldest son spent at home from the Free Grammar School we can imagine him noticing that the family resources were steadily diminishing, while every year his father had in prospect some new lawsuit or some new business scheme whereby the finances of the Shakespeares were infallibly to be restored.

After a few years' subjection to the good pedagogue

1 A small town of then about 1,300 inhabitants, clustered round the, ford at which the ancient Roman street from Londinium to Uriconium crossed the Warwickshire Avon, though from about 1490 the road was carried over the river by a noble stone bridge (still standing), called after its builder, Sir Hugh Clopton. Legend says that the bard was born on the same day of the month that he died. We may safely drink to his memory on any day from the 20th to the 25th.