E

1 11

turesque colloquial flavor in diction and in form, was an almost universal gift of Elizabethan writers and one that even the most ingenious stylists did not permit to fall into complete disuse. But this plain style lacked distinction and literary tone. Employed unambitiously, it became merely matter-of-fact, familiar, and lowly; elaborated by means of the various devices of the tumbling style, it developed into a robustious, turgid kind of writing which seemed rude and popular when it was measured by the standards of classical literature. At the other extreme stood the formal periodic style in which many writers made experiments and which found its first adequate master in Hooker. This was an appropriate kind of writing for scholarly and serious subjects, but its dignity and stateliness lifted it above the lighter and more graceful moods of the polite world. The courtly writers occupied a middle ground. In vocabulary they shunned the extremes of pedantry and of innovation, and in phrasing they struck a compromise between the shapelessness of the naïve style and the architectural formality of the period. They applied ornament extravagantly, but the ornament was not really the essential quality of their style. It belonged to an age when even men adorned their persons with feathers and with chains of gold and dressed themselves in silks and velvet. Beneath all the frippery of this rhetorical dress there lay a permanent contribution to the development of English prose in the greater ease, the greater variety of modulation which the courtly writers introduced into it. Apart from its shortlived fashionable absurdities their style was admirably adapted to the expression of the opinions, the changing s timents and actions of cultivated social life. Dryden fet Beaumont and Fletcher understood and iminaret ation of gentlemen better than ShakspETE Lad level of expression in Saks

is poetical and "aureate," not merely ornamental as in Lyly and Sidney, but elevated both in feeling and phrase to the plane of the grand style. Lyly and Sidney, however, were directly in the line of development which led to Beaumont and Fletcher, to Dryden, to Addison, to all cultivators of a graceful English literary style raised above the colloquial speech, yet not so exalted or so artfully labored as to destroy the sense of ease and reality.

VII

HISTORY AND ANTIQUITY

MEDIEVAL HISTORIANS THE CITY CHRONICLES-THE BRUT-FABYAN-FROISSART-POLYDORE VERGIL-HALL -GRAFTON-HOLINSHED-SPEED-THEORY OF HISTORICAL WRITING EARLY BIOGRAPHICAL HISTORIES CAVENDISH'S "WOLSEY"-HAYWARD-BACON'S "HENRY VII" - RALEIGH TRANSLATIONS JOHN LELANDLAMBARDE-STOWE'S "SURVEY "-CAMDEN-CONCLU

SIONS

I

THE tradition of historical writing which the early modern English historians inherited from medieval times was a venerable, if not highly differentiated one. At no time after its composition was the existence of the Old English Chronicle forgotten, and the name and writings of Bede were revered by many a later historian of far less ability than Bede. But Bede never had any genuine successors, and with the close of the Old English period, the patriotic impulse which had led to the composition of the vernacular Chronicle suffered a decline, and the Chronicle itself, in its latest continuations, tails off ignominiously in a bad Latin.

For a time little history of any kind, whether in Latin or in English, was written. With the beginning of the twelfth century, however, an abundant historical literature sprang up in England, mainly written in Latin prose and under monastic auspices. Soon also romantic metrical

histories in the vernacular began to appear. At the end of the twelfth or early in the thirteenth century was written the English metrical history of Layamon, known as the Brut, and about a century later, the English metrical chronicle of Robert of Gloucester. Another English metrical history was that of Robert Mannyng, written soon after Robert of Gloucester's chronicle, and in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, in the north of England appeared the Bruce of John Barbour. At the same time Latin continued to flourish as the language of prose historical composition, notably in the histories of Roger of Hoveden, of Matthew Paris, in the work traditionally ascribed to Matthew of Westminster, in the writings of Roger of Wendover, and of Ralph Higden, whose Polychronicon was "the standard work on general history in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries." 1

The writing of prose histories in English begins with Trevisa's translation of Higden's Polychronicon, made in 1387, and with Capgrave's more original work, written about the middle of the following century. But this new English history was not a return to or a continuation of the national Chronicle of the Old English period, nor had it learned much from the many Latin histories of the intervening period. Capgrave, following the usual encyclopedic method of the times, begins his history with the Creation, and he has quite as much to record concerning Hebrew history between the Creation and the Flood as he has concerning English history between the coming of Hengest and Horsa and the Norman Conquest. The whole history of Alfred is summed up in the following brief paragraph:

"In this tyme regned Alured in Yngland, the fourt son of Adelwold. He began to regn in the yere of our Lord 'Babington, Rolls Series, p. xlii.

DCCCLXXII. This man, be the councelle of Saint Ned, mad an open Scole of divers sciens at Oxenford. He had many batailes with Danes; and aftir many conflictes in which he had the wers, at the last he ovircam hem, and be his trety Godrus,2 here Kyng, was baptized and went hom with his puple. XXVIII yere he regned, and died the servaunt of God." 3

Brief as they are, we see in these records a complete mingling of fact and fable. Alfred is not realized as an actual historical personage, and the figures in the record move like the dim and half-forgotten actors in some old romance. Such was the naïve feeling for English history which Capgrave, "one of the most learned men of his time," had in the fifteenth century.5

4

One chief cause of the inadequacy of the work of these medieval and belated medieval historians was that they attempted too much. An encyclopedic history from the Creation down could scarcely be expected to rest throughout on a sound foundation of documentary or traditional evidence. The mere remoteness of the periods covered was in itself sufficient to account for the loose methods employed. What English history needed was to narrow its circle of inclusion, to discover some foundation of solid reality upon which to rest its feet. This foundation Englishmen discovered in their own cities, especially the city of London, an apparent and inspiring fact, and one about which were centering more and more the nation's traditions

2

"A nominative after the Latin form, made on the supposition that Godrum, from Guthrum, was an accusative.

'The Chronicle of England by John Capgrave, ed. Hingeston,

p. 113.

* Ibid., p. xii.

For a valuable summary of the historical writings of this period, see Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century, Oxford, 1913. Contemporary with Capgrave was the belated medieval rimed Chronicle of John Hardyng.