MINOR ELIZABETHAN POETS. N the present chapter we propose to speak of a few IN of Spenser's contemporaries and successors, who were rated as poets in their own generation, however neglected they may be in ours. We shall select those who have some pretensions to originality of character as well as mind; and, though we shall not mention all who claim the attention of students of literary history, we fear we shall gain the gratitude of the reader for those omitted, rather than for those included, in the survey. Sins of omission are sometimes exalted by circumstances into a high rank among the negative virtues. Among the minor poets of this era were two imitators of Spenser,— Phineas and Giles Fletcher. They were cousins of Fletcher the dramatist, but with none of his wild blood in their veins, and none of his flashing creativeness in their souls, to give evidence of the relationship. The Purple Island, a poem in twelve cantos, by Phineas, is a long allegorical description of the body and soul of man, perverse in design, melodious in versification, occasionally felicitous in the personification of abstract qualities, but on the whole to be considered as an exercise of boundless ingenuity to produce insufferable tediousness. Not in the dissecting-room itself is anatomy less poetical than in the harmonious stanzas of The Purple Island. Giles, the brother of Phineas, was the more potent spirit of the two, but his power is often directed by a taste even more elaborately bad. His poem of Christ's Victory and Triumph, in parts almost sublime, in parts almost puerile, is a proof that imaginative fertility may exist in a mind with little imaginative grasp. Campbell, however, considers him a connecting link between Spenser and Milton. Samuel Daniel, another poet of this period, was the son of a music-master, and was born in 1562. Fuller says of him, that "he carried, in his Christian and surname, two holy prophets, his monitors, so to qualify his raptures that he abhorred all profaneness." Amiable in character, gentle in disposition, and with a genius meditative rather than energetic, he appears to have possessed that combination of qualities which makes men personally pleasing if it does not make them permanently famous. He was patronized both by Elizabeth and James, was the friend of Shakespeare and Camden, and was highly esteemed by the most accomplished women of his time. A most voluminous writer in prose and verse, he was distinguished in both for the purity, simplicity, and elegance of his diction. Browne calls him "the well-languaged Daniel." But if he avoided the pedantry and quaintness which were too apt to vitiate the style of the period, and wrote what might be called modern English, it has still been found that modern Englishmen cannot be coaxed into reading what is so lucidly written. His longest work, a versified History of the Civil Wars, dispassionate as a chronicle and unimpassioned as a poem, is now only read by those critics in whom the sense of duty is victorious over the disposition to doze. The best expressions of his pensive, tender, and thoughtful nature are his epistles and his sonnets. Among the epistles, that to the Countess of Cumberland is the best. It is a model for all adulatory addresses to women; indeed, a masterpiece of subtile compliment; for it assumes in its object a sympathy with whatever is noblest in sentiment, and an understanding of whatever is most elevated in thought. The sonnets, first published in 1592, in his thirtieth year, record the strength and the disappointment of a youthful passion. The lady, whom he addresses under the name of Delia, refused him, it is said, for a wealthier lover, and the pang of this baffled affection made him wretched for years, and sent him Echo, 66 Haunting untrodden paths to wail apart." he tells us, while he was aiming to overcome the indifference of the maiden, "Echo, daughter of the air, Babbling guest of rocks and rills, And counds the accents of my ills.” Throughout the sonnets, the matchless perfection of this Delia is ever connected with her disdain of the poet who celebrates it:— "Fair is my love, and cruel as she's fair; Her brow shades frowns, although her eyes are sunny; And her disdains are gall, her favors honey. A modest maid, decked with a blush of honor, Sacred on earth, designed a saint above." This picture of the "modest maid, decked with a blush of honor," is exquisite; but it is still a picture, and not a living presence. Shakespeare, touching the same beautiful object with his life-imparting imagination, suffuses at once the sense and soul with a feeling of the vital reality, when he describes the French princess as a "maiden rosed over with the virgin crimson of modesty." The richest and most elaborately fanciful of these sonnets is that in which the poet calls upon his mistress to give back her perfections to the objects from which she derived them : "Restore thy tresses to the golden ore; Yield Cytherea's son those arcs of love; To Thetis give the honor of thy feet. Let Venus have thy graces, her resigned; And thy sweet voice give back unto the spheres; But yet restore thy fierce and cruel mind To Hyrcan tigers and to ruthless bears; So shalt thou cease to plague and I to pain." There is a fate in love. This man, who could not conquer the insensibility of one country girl, was the honored friend of the noblest and most celebrated woman of his age. Eventually, at the age of forty, he was married to a sister of John Florio, to whom his own sister, the Rosalind who jilted Spenser, is supposed to have been previously united. He died in retirement, in 1619, in his fifty-eighth year. A more powerful and a more prolific poet than Daniel was Michael Drayton, who rhymed steadily for some forty years, and produced nearly a hundred thousand lines. The son of a butcher, and born about the year 1563, he early exhibited an innocent desire to be a poet, and his first request to his tutor at college was to make |