evidence, nor stop to verify dates and facts, and the result is deplorable. General misapprehension of the true significance of the office of the Laureateship; conflicting records as to dates; claims in regard to Chaucer, Spenser, and others which cannot be sustained; critical judgments of the individual laureates which distort the whole aspect of their official work; the repeated quotation of a spurious sonnet by Wordsworth, which, by its absurdity and atrocious lack of taste, not only reveals its inauthenticity, but, like all parody, tends to affect the influence of the genuine and magnificent products of his genius :—these are a few instances where the journalist misleads the general reader. No detailed study of this subject can be made without reference to books which are inaccessible outside of the large libraries--many of the most essential are to be found only in the British Museum. Though they not seldom conflict with one another, the biographical dictionaries are of course very helpful; those in French and German especially so, the foreign estimate of our men of genius being often very valuable. It is to be much regretted that the excellent book by Austin and Ralph is out of print and almost impossible to be obtained. Walter Hamilton's book discusses the laureates quite fully, although it lacks orderly arrangement and is somewhat coloured by personal prejudice. Nor has it the polish of style or the dignity of treatment of Austin and Ralph. It lays so much stress upon the burlesques and the lampoons which the laureates inspired from their contemporaries, that the finer outlines of true criticism are sometimes blurred. Thus the author is not always just to Southey, and he is wholly blind to the peculiar significance and value of Wordsworth's work. Two articles in The Atlantic Monthly of 1858 under the name of Daphnaides are stimulating and suggestive. The greater part of that which has appeared in the magazines and newspapers since the death of Tennyson is, however, inaccurate and wholly unsuited to the dignity of the subject. NEW YORK, 1895. INTRODUCTION. ORIGIN AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENGLISH LAUREATESHIP. I. WERE our judgment of the poets laureate of England to be based upon the current opinion of them and their work in literature, we should be inclined to consider that it was their great misfortune not only to be poets laureate, but that fate imposed upon them any compulsion to be poets at all. Since the death of Tennyson more attention has been paid to the past history and to the probable future of the English Laureateship than ever before. The explanations of the origin of this important office which have been given have, however, been conflicting, and much confusion has been thrown into the discussion. But upon one point the majority of those who have written about the poets laureate agree, and that is in sounding a note of disparagement in regard both to the office and those who have held it; if they praise at all, the praise is of such a nature as to be in itself a condemnation. History has undoubtedly given these critics a certain basis for the severity of their remarks. The solitary office in England, to be held professedly by no one but a poet, had often been given to sycophants, time servers, and favourites of corrupt courts, who had little poetical genius to recommend them. As late as 1816 one of Robert Southey's friends advised him to rest satisfied with the safe obscurity of his predecessors. "A poet laureate," he said, "is naturally a ridiculous personage; the laurel which the monarch gives has nothing in common with that bestowed by the Muses, and the warrant is of no authority in the court of Apollo." But Southey felt, and rightly too, that, though the muse of men like Tate or Eusden was indeed commonplace, that of some of the other laureates had proved herself of lofty lineage; his own muse, he said, being a dignified and high-born dame who guarded his laurels in the grove on the mountain-side where dwelt his winged horse. What these laureates have suffered at the hands of the critics of the present time is not to be compared to the abuse which was lavished upon them by their contemporaries. The literary history of England is full of the records of the burlesques, the lampoons, the coarse wit and satire, which have been directed against any poet who has struggled into notice, and won distinction above his fellows. The poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were especially exposed to these satirical assaults. The prevailing opinion is not always the true or the just one, though, of course, it has a measure of truth and of justice as its foundation. The prevailing opinion in regard to these poets of England who were crowned with the laurel is more often based upon the satires and lampoons of which they were the occasion, than upon the nature of their own poetical work. People read Dryden and Pope instead of Shadwell and Cibber; but the Colley Cibber of the "Dunciad," and the Thomas Shadwell of "Mac Flecknoe" are not the true Cibber and the true Shadwell. The laureates have been more assailed by satire than other poets, and this not because they were necessarily poor poets, but because their very position excited envy. Though men like Gray and Scott refused the appointment of the Laureateship, the position was often eagerly sought. Especially about the time of Davenant, poets vied with one another for preference; some were even bold enough to call themselves laureates when they had no cause whatever to assume the title. After the death of Eusden, when the unfortunate Richard Savage failed to receive the appointment for which he sued with so much servility, he called himself the volunteer laureate, and in that capacity wrote a number of odes for the queen, services which she liberally rewarded. II. When the origin and true significance of the Laureateship are fully understood, there seems less disposition on the part of the student of literature to disparage the achievement of those men upon whom the honour was bestowed. Being appointed a poet laureate did not always in the past, nor would it at the present time, imply that such a poet was greater than his fellows. To suppose this is to misapprehend the nature of the office. It must always be remembered that the Laureateship was a court appointment, an office in the gift of the Government. Hence the laureate was a court poet, and one who of necessity must be in sympathy with the monarch and all monarchical measures. That this misapprehension of the Laureateship is very common is proved by the numerous newspaper remarks upon the subject. A recent writer, in expressing the usual cant about these laureates being such sorry poets, says, "Think of Southey being laureate while Byron was alive!" We might retort, Think of Byron, the poet of revolution, writing a Vision of Judgment,' in which an infamous king was canonised; or of Byron being in a position where odes like Southey's on the negotiations with Bonaparte, or the visits of the king to Ireland and Scotland, were expected!" Shelley and Byron were undoubtedly greater poets than Southey; but to have seen them made court poets would have been one of the strangest things that could ever occur in the history of English poetry! III. It is true that from the era of Ben Jonson to that of Southey, few of these poets laureate sought to penetrate far into the meaning of human life; they were neither impressed by its mystery, nor did they sound the depths of its joy and its pain. They did not "utter wisdom from the central deep," nor possess that which Bodenstedt describes as the philosophy which, "Auf stolzen Schwinge Sucht wie ein Adler zum Lichte zu dringen, Their work, therefore, lacks power and loftiness as well as depth, and it is without moral strength and dignity. The cause of this is not far to seek. When Elizabeth was well established upon the throne of England, and in the full enjoyment of her power, a new spirit became evident in literature, which caused her reign to be considered the most glorious in English history. This outburst of the national mind was ardent and eager, original and creative. This eagle-like spirit of genius reached the height of its flight in the years between 1603 and 1626, in the reign of Elizabeth's successor. In the reign of Charles I., however, a marked change began to manifest itself-the glory had begun to wane. Ben Jonson, the first poet to be honoured by the office of the Laureateship as it now is understood, did his best work amid the influences which made the Elizabethan age so great. It was because of his eminent services to literature that in 1616-some authorities say 1619—James I. granted to Ben Jon son letters patent making him poet laureate. Charles I. had been king five years when he reconsidered this appointment of his father. He issued new letters patent to Ben Jonson, which for the first time made the Laureateship a permanent institution. But after this the glory of the "Elizabethan Age" not only began to wane, but the Laureateship came to be considered not only a reward for literary services, but a gift dependent largely upon court patronage. From the death of Jonson in 1637 to the death of Henry James Pye in 1813, when Southey succeeded him, one hundred and seventy-six years passed. In that period the Stuarts lost the throne of England. During the Commonwealth the laureate, Sir Willam Davenant, was deposed. When the Restoration came English poetry received a blow from which it took over a hundred years to recover, The creative age of Shakespeare was past and gone. The influence of French taste and of French codes of morality, of foreign standards of art, was felt everywhere. Literature became artificial and concerned itself with externals, and there was a moral blight upon the drama. The Augustan age of Anne, which gave us Pope and Swift and all that brilliant circle, though it was rich in prose, produced no great inspired natural poet. Inspiration, naturalness, and a high poetic ideal seem to have vanished until Cowper and Burns appeared. It is therefore not surprising that during these hundred and seventy-six years, when there were ten poets laureate, there should be among the number no supremely great poet. Among the ten, Dryden stands first, and next to him, Warton. But Dryden, with all his facile skill, his command of the resources of language, and his brilliant wit, produced no poem which was the outcome of an exalted mood. His work lacked dignity and moral strength, and was wholly without those finer influences which tend to inspire and elevate humanity. Warton, noble poet as he was, stood halfway between the school that was going out and the school that was coming in. Cowper and Burns appeared only a few years before Warton died, and Wordsworth published nothing till after Warton's death. Warton scarcely felt the force of the tide which was bearing English poetry on to new regions of thought. He was great compared to the men who immediately preceded him, but he belonged to an artificial school, and his art felt the influence of its limitations. For twenty-three years Henry James Pye wore the wreath of laurel. During that time English poetry was being brought back to nature by the inspired work of Wordsworth and his great contemporaries, but the new revelation which had come to them, the new spirit which was animating English poetry, |