reign of James I., and even in that of his successor seems scarcely to have met with the encouragement which was bestowed on the sister arts. Few works of sculpture were executed during this period in England, except monuments, and few of those rise above mediocrity. Previously to the reign of Charles I. the sculptor seems hardly to have been considered as an artist. We find several names conjoined in the construction of a monument, among which that of the sculptor of the effigies is in no way distinguished from the rest. Several obscure foreigners are recorded during the early part of this period as being engaged on works of this kind. The first native sculptor of whom we have any account is Epiphanius Evesham, who is mentioned in terms of high commendation by a contemporary writer; but as it was not the custom of the sculptors of the period to put their names on their works, it is impossible to identify anything as of his hand for the same reason the authors of some of the most meritorious works of this date remain unknown. The tomb of Sir Francis Vere in the north transept at Westminster is by no mean sculptor. The design, which represents four knights supporting a slab on which is laid the armour of the deceased, whose effigy lies beneath, is, indeed, borrowed from the monument of Engelbert of Nassau, at Breda, a work of sufficient merit to countenance the tradition which assigns it to Michel Angelo; but the individual figures are original and of great beauty, especially the heads, HOUSE FORMERLY STANDING IN LONG LANE, SMITHFIELD. that is to say, such of them as have escaped the wanton mutilation with which, more Anglicano, they have been assailed. Sir Francis Vere died in 1609. The monument of Lord Norris, in the same locality, is one of those gorgeous canopied mausolea which it was still the fashion to erect. Around it devoutly kneel the warlike figures of his six sons, "a brood of martial-spirited men," all highly distinguished in arms. Some of them also are irreparably mutilated; but those which remain entire are remarkable for their expression: of one in particular it is not too much to pronounce, that the sculptor has attained a perfection which the ancients frequently sought in vain-an expression at once calm and intense, produced by a feeling of which the ancients perhaps had little idea. The fervour of devotion is personified in this unpretending figure-the very hands are eloquent. Lord Norris died in 1601, but this monument was executed some years later. Nicholas Stone was the sculptor most in vogue. He was master-mason to the king, and was employed at the Banqueting House under Inigo Jones. He executed a great number of monuments, which are to be identified by an account he has left of them in his own handwriting. His works are by no means above the general level of the period as works of art, though he sometimes takes an ambitious flight, as in the monument of Sir George Hollis, at Westminster, a very humble imitation of the tombs in the Medici Chapel at Florence. They are, however, remarkable for the transition they display from the ancient to the modern style of monumental composition. Sutton's tomb at the Charter House, designed in conjunction with Bernard Jansen, a Dutch architect, in 1615, is of the former class, and may be contrasted with that of Sir Dudley Carleton, Lord Dorchester, at Westminster, executed in 1649, in the style of which he has evidently been influenced by his connexion with the great architect, and in which he has generalized the costume by the folds of the baronial robe. Stone's best work is the statue of Sir Francis Hollis, youngest son of the Earl of Clare, also at Westminster, which is so far superior to his own general taste and that of the age, that Walpole supposes the design to have been suggested by the earl himself; but, however this may be, the graceful pose of the figure and the high finish of the work must certainly be due to the artist. This and other statues by Stone are among the earliest examples of the adoption of the Roman costume, which became so grossly abused in the arts at a later period. Stone died in 1647, leaving two sons, who never attained the reputation of their father, though they visited Italy and studied under Bernini. During the reign of Charles I. several foreign sculptors of reputation came to share the patronage which was so freely dispensed in England to the professors of the arts. François Anguier and Ambroise du Val were natives of France, and were extensively employed in monumental sculpture; but, for the reason before mentioned, it is difficult to identify their works. Hubert le Soeur was an artist of a much higher grade. He was a pupil of John of Bologna, and the first sculptor we had who successfully practised in the highest branches of the art. He arrived about 1630, and executed many works in bronze, of which the beautiful equestrian statue of his royal patron at Charing Cross remains to perpetuate his fame in the metropolis. It was of course condemned to destruction by the parliament, but the brazier to whom it was sold for the value of the metal, upon the express condition that he should break it up, concealed it until the Restoration, and it was placed in its present situation about 1678. This worthy tradesman (whose name was John Rivet) is said to have reaped a considerable profit by the sale of toys supposed to be manufactured from the materials of this statue, which were readily purchased as relics by the royalists. Francesco Fanelli, a Florentine, was also a sculptor in metal, but greatly inferior to Le Sœur. Charles wished to possess a bust of himself by Bernini, who at this time enjoyed the greatest reputation, both as a sculptor and architect, of any artist in Europe. For this purpose Vandyke painted the well-known picture in which the king is represented in three views.* It is said that Bernini, on receiving the picture, was struck with the physiognomy of Charles, which he pronounced to be that of a man doomed to misfortune. The bust was executed, but what became of it is not certainly known. We must now enter upon the consideration of another department of the fine arts upon which we have not hitherto had occasion to touch, but in which England has confessedly borne away the honours from all Europe,-engraving. So little was done in this art in England previously to the seventeenth century that Vertue professedly begins his Catalogue of Engravers from the year 1600; but a few facts, and the names of several artists who engraved both on wood and copper at an earlier date, are worthy of notice in an historical point of view. Indeed we had engraving as early as printing, since the earliest English printers introduced small plates for their devices, and Caxton's Golden Legend, published in 1483, has many cuts dispersed through the body of the work. The first book that appeared with copperplates was a medical book published by Thomas Raynalde in 1540, but no engraver's name is affixed to them. The earliest English copperplate engraver known by name is Thomas Geminus, who executed the plates for another medical book about the end of Henry VIII.'s reign. Before the end of the sixteenth century the English engravers had attained sufficient reputation to be engaged in foreign countries. Some of the plates for Abraham Ortelius's "Theatrum Orbis Terrarum,' published at Antwerp in 1570, were executed by Thomas Geminus, and Humfrey Lluyd of Denbighshire. Ortelius himself speaks in high terms of the English engravers, and, besides the abovementioned, has recorded the names of Antony Jenkinson, who flourished in 1562, and Robert Leeth. "Engraving," observes Walpole, "was in no contemptible condition in England when we had professors worthy of being employed to adorn Flemish editions. Flanders was at that time a capital theatre of arts and learning." Ralph Aggas is famous for his plans and views, especially his great plan of London, executed in the reign of Elizabeth; and to Christopher Saxton we are indebted for the first publication of county maps. George Hoefnagle, Theodore de la Brie, and Elstracke are the most celebrated of the foreigners who flourished here during the same period. Early in the seventeenth century Crispin Pass, of Utrecht, settled in this country and executed numerous plates. There were several artists of this name, and of the same family, who all engraved with great neatness, one of whom, Simon Pass, was the master of John Payne, the first English engraver whose works merit distinction on the score of art; but he appears to have been of an idle disposition, and to have wasted talents which might have placed him at the head of his See ante, p. 110. profession. Though he enjoyed the patronage of King Charles, he neglected his fame and fortune, and died in indigence before he was forty. The transcendent talents of Vandyke could not fail to call forth artists worthy to multiply his works by the graver. Robert de Voerst and Luke Vostermans established themselves in England, and are both well known by their admirable transcripts of his works. These engravers appear also to have been the first who executed historical works in England; the latter, especially, did some. excellent plates from the collections of the king and the Earl of Arundel. In the year 1637 England became the adopted. country of an engraver who, although he never attained to any great degree of perfection beyond a limited range of art, has yet, by his unwearied industry and the great variety and usefulness of his labours, acquired a distinguished and deserved reputation. This was the indefatigable and illused Winceslaus Hollar. He was a native of Prague, and was bred to the law, which he deserted to follow the bent of his genius, and soon distinguished himself by his views of the various cities he visited in his travels. At Cologne he was so fortunate as to meet with the Earl of Arundel, then on his way to the Imperial Court, who took him into his train, and remained his patron and protector as long as he lived. Shortly before the Civil War he was introduced to the service of the royal family, and employed as drawing-master to Prince Charles. It was at this time he engraved several heads after Vandyke, but to the treatment of that master his style was by no means equal. Hollar's prosperity was fatally affected by the downfall of the royal cause. The Earl of Arundel was compelled to take refuge abroad, and Hollar, after suffering greatly from the fortune of war, made his escape from a prison and joined his patron at Antwerp. After the death of the earl, in 1646, he remained in obscurity till 1652, when he returned to England, and occupied himself during several years upon plates for various books, among which the illustrations of Dugdale's works are well known; but he was so miserably paid, that he could never succeed in raising himself from a state of absolute indigence. Being sent (after the Restoration) to assist in making a survey of the town and fortifications of Tangier, the government treated him no better than the booksellers; and for a year's labour, attended with infinite danger and difficulty, he obtained no more, after long solicitation and loss of time, than one hundred pounds. His painful and laborious life was extended to the term of seventy years, and ended in misery. The engravings of Hollar, according to Vertue's "It has been stated to me," says Vertue, speaking of Hollar's view of Greenwich, oue of his long prints in two sheets," that Stent, the printseller, paid him no more than thirty shillings for the drawing and engraving, which two plates might be worth five times as much, taking advantage of the poor man's necessity in the sickness time, 1665, which put a stop to all works of the kind; and the fire of London happening the year after stagnated all affairs of prints and books, and reduced him to such difficulties as he could never overcome." What would a modern engraver say even to Vertue's esti mate? catalogue, in which they are arranged in fourteen classes, amount to the incredible number of 2384, many of which, moreover, are from his own drawings. His maps, plans, views, churches, and monuments -a mine of information and delight to the English antiquary and topographer-are no less than 840, and his portraits 355. Some of his views are very large his great view of London is in seven sheets, and extends two yards and a half in length, and several others are on two sheets. In panoramic views of this kind he excelled; but Hollar had little of the painter's feeling, and praise is chiefly due to him as a draughtsman and antiquary, and for the scrupulous fidelity with which he rendered the objects before him. In minute works he is the finished artist. His engraving of muffs has never been equalled as a representation of fur; and his shells from the Arundel collection are no less perfect. Hollar had several scholars, among whom Gaywood is his closest imitator. The history of engraving may be concluded for the present with the mention of Peter Lombart, a native of Paris, and a very excellent artist. He came to England before 1654, and remained until after the Restoration. He engraved after Vandyke with great success, and is well known by the set of female half-lengths from that master, called "The Lombart Beauties," It is related of this artist that he erased the face from his plate of Charles I. on horseback, in order to insert that of Cromwell, and replaced the king's at the Restoration. It is remarkable that the period of the commonwealth, so unfavourable to the arts in general, should be illustrated by the most exquisite coinage which has appeared in modern times. This, as already mentioned, was the work of an Englishman, the celebrated Thomas Simon. He was a pupil of Nicolas Briot, a native of Lorraine, engraver to the Mint in the time of Charles I., and succeeded him in his office in 1646. His first known work, the Admiralty seal, dates ten years earlier. In 1648 he executed the parliament seal, and, remaining in his post after the death of the king, has transmitted the features of Oliver Cromwell to posterity on the obverse of the commonwealth money in a style which has never been excelled in modern art, unless by some of the best in the series of papal medals. He was employed to execute the Restoration medals, but was superseded at the Mint in 1662. Being thus thrown out of occupation, he presented a petition to the king, accompanied by a crown piece, which he had executed for the purpose of proving his superiority over the Roetiers, who filled his place, and which is undoubtedly one of the finest specimens of the art of medalling ever produced. Simon is believed to have died of the plague in 1665, nothing being known of him after that time. His elder brother, Abraham Simon, was also a good artist. Excluding from view the productions of the last fifty years, as not yet ripe for the verdict of history, we may affirm that our National literature, properly so called, that is, whatever of our literature by right of its poetic shape or spirit is to be held as peculiarly belonging to the language and the country, had its noon-day in the space comprehended within the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first of the seventeenth centuries. A splendid afternoon flush also succeeded this meridian blaze, which lasted for a third of a century longer, or down to the Restoration. Paradise Lost, indeed, did not appear till some years after that event; but the poetry of the old age of Milton really did not belong to the time in which it was produced,the "evil days" of frivolity and imitation on which the poet had fallen: he was of the race of the old giants, and apprehended rightly that he had come 66 an age too late." The same thing may be said of the prose poetry of Jeremy Taylor, although of those of his writings that were not given to the world till after the Restoration the greatest were actually the produce of the preceding age. Milton, and Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Cudworth, and Henry More, and Cowley, the most eminent of our English writers in the period from the Restoration to the Revolution (if we except Dryden, the founder of a new school, and Barrow, whose writings, full as they are of thought, have not much of the poetical or untranslatable), were all of them, it is worthy of observation, born before the close of the reign of James I., or within the age which has been just described as the noonday of our literature. The light of that golden time did not utterly depart so long as any of them lived. A boyhood or youth passed in the days of Shakspeare and Bacon, and a manhood in those of the Great Rebellion, formed a training which could not fail to rear high powers to their highest reach of achievement. We will now proceed to follow the history of our dramatic literature from the point to which we sketched its rise and progress in the last Book. Both Moral plays, and even the more ancient Miracle plays, continued to be occasionally performed down to the very end of the sixteenth century. One of the last dramatic representations at which Elizabeth was present was a Moral play, entitled The Contention between Liberality and Prodigality, which was performed before her majesty in 1600, or 1601. This production was printed in 1602, and was probably written not long before that time: it has been attributed to Robert Greene, who died in 1592. The only three manuscripts of the Chester Miracle plays now extant were written in 1600, 1604, and 1607, most probably while the plays still continued to be acted. There is evidence that the ancient annual Miracle plays were acted at Tewkesbury at least till 1585, at Coventry till 1591, at Newcastle till 1598, and at Kendal down even to the year 1603. As has been observed, however, by Mr. Collier, the latest and best historian of the English drama, the Moral plays were enabled to keep possession of the stage so long as they did, partly by means of the approaches they had for some time been making to a more improved species of composition, "and partly because, under the form of allegorical fiction and abstract character, the writers introduced matter which covertly touched upon public events, popular prejudices, and temporary opinions."* He mentions, in particular, the Moral entitled 'The Three Ladies of London,' printed in 1584, and its continuation, 'The Three Lords and Three Ladies of London,' which appeared in 1590 (both by R. W.), as belonging to this class. Meanwhile, long before the earliest of these dates, the ancient drama had, in other hands, assumed wholly a new form. Mr. Collier appears to consider the Interludes of John Heywood, the earliest of which must have been written before 1521, as first exhibiting the Moral play in a state of transition to the regular tragedy and comedy. "John Heywood's dramatic productions," he says, "almost form a class by themselves: they are neither Miracle plays nor Moral plays, but what may be properly and strictly called Interludes, a species of writing of which he has a claim to be considered the inventor, although the term interlude was applied generally to theatrical productions in the reign of Edward IV." A notion of the nature of these compositions may be collected from the plot of one of them,-'A Mery Play betwene the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and neighbour Pratte,' printed in 1533, of which Mr. Collier gives the following account:-" A pardoner and a friar have each obtained leave of the curate to use his church,-the one for the exhibition of his relics, and the other for the delivery of a sermon, the object of both being the same, that of procuring money. The friar arrives first, and is about to commence his discourse when the pardoner enters and disturbs him: each is desirous of being heard, and, after many vain attempts by force of lungs, they proceed to force of arms, kicking and cuffing each other unmercifully. curate, galled by the disturbance in his church, endeavours, without avail, to part the combatants; he therefore calls in neighbour Pratte to his assistance, and, while the curate seizes the friar, Pratte undertakes to deal with the pardoner, in order that they may set them in the stocks. It turns out that both the friar and the pardoner are too much for their assailants; and the latter, after a sound drubbing, are glad to come to a composition, by which the former are allowed quietly to depart."+ Here, then, we have a dramatic fable, or incident at least, conducted, not by allegorical personifications, but by characters of real life, which is the essential difference that distinguishes the true tragedy or comedy from the mere moral. Heywood's Interludes, however, of which there are two or three more of the same description with this (besides others partaking more of the allegorical character), are all only single acts, or, more properly, scenes, and exhibit, therefore, nothing more than the mere rudiments or embryo of the regular comedy. Idem, p. 396. • Hist. of Dramatic Poetry, ii. 413. The Its The earliest English comedy, properly so called, that has yet been discovered, is that of Ralph Roister Doister, the production of Nicholas Udall, an eminent classical scholar in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, and one of the masters, first at Eton, and afterwards at Westminster. existence was unknown till a copy was discovered in 1818, which was perhaps not printed earlier than 1566 (for the title page was gone); but the play is mentioned in Thomas Wilson's Rule of Reason,' first printed in 1551, and other considerations make it probable that it may have been written some fifteen or twenty years before.* This hypothesis would carry it back to about the same date with the earliest of Heywood's Interludes; and it certainly was produced while that writer was still alive and in the height of his popularity. It may be observed that Wilson calls Udall's play an interlude, which would therefore seem to have been at this time the common name for any dramatical composition, as indeed it appears to have been for nearly a century preceding. The author himself, however, in his prologue, announces it as a "Comedy, or Interlude," and as an imitation of the classical models of Plautus and Terence. very And, in truth, both in character and in plot, Ralph Roister Doister has every right to be regarded as a true comedy, showing, indeed, in its execution, the rudeness of the age, but in its plan, and in reference to the principle upon which it is constructed, as regular and as complete as any comedy in the language. It is divided into acts and scenes, which few of the Moral plays are; and, according to Mr. Collier's estimate, the performance could not have been concluded in less time than about two hours and a half, while few of the Morals would require more than about an hour for their representation.† The dramatis persona are thirteen in all, nine male and four female; and the two principal ones at least, Ralph himself, a vain, thoughtless, blustering fellow, whose ultimately baffled pursuit of the gay and rich widow Custance forms the action of the piece, and his servant, Matthew Merrygreek, a kind of flesh-andblood representative of the Vice of the old Moral plays, are strongly discriminated, and drawn altogether with much force and spirit. The story is not very ingeniously involved, but it moves forward through its gradual development, and onwards to the catastrophe, in a sufficiently bustling, lively manner; and some of the situations, though the humour is rather farcical than comic, are very cleverly conceived and managed. The language also may be said to be, on the whole, racy and characteristic, if not very polished. A few lines from a speech of one of the widow's handmaidens, Tibet Talkapace, in a conversation with her fellow-servants on the approaching marriage of their masters, may be quoted as a specimen : "I hearde our nourse speake of an husband to-day |