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the year of his father's death. He seems to have come to London in the summer of 1657, and was at first in the home of his cousin, and Cromwell's friend, Sir Gilbert Pickering. He was in his twenty-eighth year when Cromwell died, on the 3rd of September, 1658, and he wrote, after the funeral, one of the many tributes to his memory, Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell, using the measure of "Gondibert." With customary strain to be ingenious, there was a simple close.

George Wither (ch. viii. § 39) and Andrew Marvell (§ 8) had followed Cromwell's career with their verse. George Wither had published, in 1655, a poem called The Protector, upon Cromwell's acceptance of that office. Andrew Marvell had written loyally on the first anniversary of his government, and he was now among the mourners.

25. The fabric held together by the might of Cromwell fell after his death. His amiable son Richard called a Parliament which vanished before the power of the army, and Richard Cromwell passed from the Protectorate to private life. He lived to see the Revolution, and he died a country gentleman, in 1712. The attempt to revive the Long Parliament as a central authority failed also to restrain the army. George Monk marched out of Scotland to subdue, as he said, the military tyranny in England, but it was soon evident that there was no hopeful way out of the discord but a Restoration of the Monarchy.

In these days John Milton, first fearing predominance of the Presbyterians, had addressed to the Parliament called by Richard Cromwell A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, showing that it is not lawful for any power on earth to compel in matters of religion. To the revived Long Parliament, which succeeded the short-lived Parliament called by Richard Cromwell, Milton addressed Considerations touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church, in which he argued that each pastor should be maintained by his own flock. On the 20th of October, 1659, Milton wrote a letter to a friend On the Ruptures of the Commonwealth, and addressed a brief letter to Monk on The Present Means and Brief Delineation of a Free Commonwealth, easy to be put in Practice and without Delay. A few months later he published a pamphlet called The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, and the Excellence thereof, compared with the Inconveniences and Dangers of Re-admitting Kingship in this Nation. His main suggestion was: "Being now in anarchy, without a counselling

and governing power, and the army, I suppose, finding themselves insufficient to discharge at once both military and civil affairs, the first thing to be found out with all speed, without which no Commonwealth can subsist, must be a Senate, or General Council of State, in whom must be the power, first, to preserve the public peace; next, the commerce with foreign nations; and, lastly, to raise monies for the management of those affairs: this must either be the Parliament re-admitted to sit, or a Council of State allowed of by the army, since they only now have the power. The terms to be stood on are, liberty of conscience to all professing Scripture to be their rule of faith and worship; and the abjuration of a single person." He urged to the last moment of hope the first principles of what he said is not called amiss “the good old cause ;” adding, “Thus much I should perhaps have said, though I was sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to but with the prophet, 'O Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay, though what I have spoke should happen (which Thou suffer not who didst create mankind free, nor Thou next who didst redeem us from being servants of men !) to be the last words of our expiring liberty."

CHAPTER X.

FROM THE COMMONWEALTH TO THE REVOLUTION.

CHARLES II.

1. THE second of the Four Periods into which, with reference to outward fashion only, English Literature is divided, was now passing away, and the third-the Period of French Influence-came in rapidly after the accession of Charles II. We should have felt it sooner if we had been less intent upon our own affairs during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth, for the foundations of it were laid while Charles I. was our king. The English Royalists who lived in France after the failure of the king's cause were there being educated in its fashions.

Italian influence in France, blended as elsewhere with influence of Spain, had produced forms answering to English Euphuism; but they were of a lower kind, because there was not then in France, as in England, a time of special literary energy. There was a taste for long stories, blending the Spanish

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chivalrous romance with the pastoral (ch. vi. § 39, 40), a more marked classicism, a delight in sounding phrases. In the time of our Elizabeth, Ronsard (b. 1524, d. 1585) was extending the use of the ten-syllabled line, rhymed in couplets, which became to the French what blank verse has become to us. Our poets were then experimenting, with various success, in the enrichment of the language with new words from Greek and Latin. Ronsard carried this far, tried Latin signs of comparison-docte, doctieur, doctime-and made a verse of three of the words that he wished he might use “ ocymore, dyspotme, oligochronien." Malherbe (b. 1555, d. 1628) followed Ronsard with finer taste, and was, during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, the most determined champion of the verbal purity of French. He was known as the tyrant of words and syllables. "This doctor in the vulgar tongue," wrote his friend Balzac, "used to say that for so many years he had been trying to de-Gasconise the Court, and that he could not do it. Death surprised him when rounding a period." "An hour before his death," says his disciple Racan, "Malherbe woke up with a start to correct his nurse for use of a word that was not good French; and when his confessor reprimanded him for that, he said that he could not help himself, and that he would defend to the death the purity of the French language." We only understand, but Malherbe felt, the need of earnest critical attention to the unsettled language of his country as France rose in power. Deliberation in the choice of words made him a slow writer. He spent three years in the composition of an ode intended to console the President of Verdun for the loss of a wife. When the ode was finished, the president had consoled himself by marrying another.

Sidney's Arcadia (ch. vii. § 44), which first blended the heroic with the pastoral in a long romance of adventure, had in England no direct imitators; but in France books of this kind established themselves as the prose fiction of their day, and the best of them, as we have seen (ch. ix. § 20) were translated into English during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth. Their line began with the Astrée of Honoré d'Urfé (b. 1567, d. 1625), first appearing in 1608, 10, 19, in three parts. His secretary, Baro, published the rest, completed in 1627. Our version appeared in 1657, as Astrea: A Romance written in French, by Messere Honoré d'Urfe, and Translated by a Person of Quality. Its primitive Arcadia was placed in the valley of the Loire; and its variety of

excellent discourses and extraordinary sententiousness caused Richelieu to say that "He was not to be admitted into the Academy of Wit who had not been well read in ‘Astrea.""

In the year 1600, Catherine de Vivonne de Pisani married, at the age of sixteen, the Marquis de Rambouillet, Grand Master of the Royal Wardrobe. In the polite society gathered about her at the Hôtel Rambouillet ladies predominated; and they occupied themselves so much with the maintenance of a high standard of refinement in speech, that they and their imitators were called, in all gravity, and in their own fine phrase, Les Précieuses. French was unsettled. North and south of the Loire the difference of dialect was almost difference of language. The court dialect of Henry IV. and his Béarnois shocked all the polite Parisians; the king's oaths shocked the ladies. In those days polite people were reading the polite dialogue of "Astrée," Malherbe was upholding purity of French, Vaugelas (b. 1585, d. 1650) was giving his mind to a refined study of the language, and the blossom-time of French literature was not far distant. But of what use to have a literature where the language is unsettled, and a hundred years hence its changes will defeat an author's hope of outliving his body in his books? The ladies of Paris began the movement of reform by exercising social influence; and the Marquise de Rambouillet, reinforced by four daughters, was still living at the accession of Charles II. Many English "persons of quality" in Paris during the Commonwealth would be among her guests. The doings of the Précieuses, though blended with weakness and affectation, had importance for the history of literature during the first thirty or forty years of the seventeenth century. Receiving company while on her bed, after a fashion of the time and the manner of the whole community of the Précieuses, who followed in her steps—so giving to fashion the phrase “courir les ruelles”—and in winter denying fire as perilous to the complexion of herself and of her delicate guests in chamber, corridor, or alcove, the Marquise de Rambouillet welcomed princes and wits at her weekly feasts of verbal criticism. Before her circle Pierre Corneille read his tragedies, and the youth Bossuet first displayed the genius of the preacher. Purity of speech was demanded of all who frequented the Hôtel Rambouillet. There was to be no unclean word, and much that was common it pleased the particular genius of the house to call unclean. The marchioness disdaining her own common name of Catherine, Malherbe tortured his wit and produced for her

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instead of it Arthénice, its anagram. Vaugelas, the grammarian, ranked above princes at the Hôtel Rambouillet. "If the word féliciter is not yet French," wrote Balzac, "it will be so next year; M. de Vaugelas has given me his word not to oppose it." Over-familiar words, if tolerated by the French at large, were replaced at the head-quarters of polite speech by delicatelyconceited phrases. As the marchioness saw company in her night-cap, and the idea Night-cap might have to be expressed in conversation, while the word was too coarse for choice lips, its association with sleep and dreams suggested that it might be referred to as "the innocent accomplice of falsehood." Laughter was clownish, but if mentioned it might be described as loss of seriousness. Literature itself was not to be debased into a pleasure for the vulgar; it was not to be national, it was to be all polite. In 1629, gatherings allied to these became habitual at the house of Valentine Conrart, one of the king's secretaries, who had a turn for books; and out of these meetings came Richelieu's suggestion that Conrart and his fellow-workers should proceed systematically, following a fashion common in Italy, but chiefly imitating the Academia della Crusca, founded in 1582, and rule over French, under royal letters-patent, as a FRENCH ACADEMY, with forty members. The formation of this academy was completed in 1636. It was to meet once a week, to labour with all possible care and diligence to give fixed rules to the language, and to make it more eloquent and fitter for the treatment of the arts and sciences. It was to produce a dictionary. Only words in the dictionary of the Academy were to be esteemed good French. It was to produce also a grammar, a treatise on rhetoric, and a treatise of poetry, establishing its laws for the politest literature of all kinds. The great question of choice of words, and criticism about verse and prose, now occupied many minds; and as Regnier said of the critics of this school, all they did was to prose about rhyme and rhyme about prose.

"S'ils font quelque chose,

C'est proser de la rime, et rimer de la prose."

Poets were small and romancers long-winded. The diffuse pastoral romances dealt only with the love and heroism of royal personages. The chief writers of those romances, all born about the beginning of the seventeenth century, were Marin le Roy de Gomberville, who wrote 99 66 "Polexandre," Cytherée," and "La Jeune Alcidiane;" Gautier de Costes Seigneur de la Calprenède,