CHAPTER VIII

1555 TO 1558

Elizabeth applies herself to classical literature.—Its neglected state.—Progress of English poetry.—Account of Sackville and his works.—Plan of his Mirror for Magistrates.—Extracts.—Notice of the contributors to this collection.—Its popularity and literary merits.—Entertainment given to Elizabeth by sir Thomas Pope.—Dudley Ashton's attempt.—Elizabeth acknowledged innocent of his designs.—Her letter to the queen.—She returns to London—quits it in some disgrace after again refusing the duke of Savoy.—Violence of Philip respecting this match.—Mary protects her sister.—Festivities at Hatfield, Enfield, and Richmond.—King of Sweden's addresses to Elizabeth rejected.—Letter of sir T. Pope respecting her dislike of marriage.—Proceedings of the ecclesiastical commission.—Cruel treatment of sir John Cheke.—General decay of national prosperity.—Loss of Calais.—Death of Mary.

Notwithstanding the late fortunate change in her situation, Elizabeth must have entertained an anxious sense of its remaining difficulties, if not dangers; and the prudent circumspection of her character again, as in the latter years of her brother, dictated the expediency of shrouding herself in all the obscurity compatible with her rank and expectations. To literature, the never failing resource of its votaries, she turned again for solace and occupation; and claiming the assistance which Ascham was proud and happy to afford her, she resumed the diligent perusal of the Greek and Latin classics.

The concerns of the college of which sir Thomas Pope was the founder likewise engaged a portion of her thoughts; and this gentleman, in a letter to a friend, mentions that the lady Elizabeth, whom he served, and who was "not only gracious but right learned," often asked him of the course which he had devised for his scholars.

Classical literature was now daily declining from the eminence on which the two preceding sovereigns had labored to place it. The destruction of monastic institutions, and the dispersion of libraries, with the impoverishment of public schools and colleges through the rapacity of Edward's courtiers, had inflicted far deeper injury on the cause of learning than the studious example of the young monarch and his chosen companions was able to compensate. The persecuting spirit of Mary, by driving into exile or suspending from the exercise of their functions the able and enlightened professors of the protestant doctrine, had robbed the church and the universities of their brightest luminaries; and it was not under the auspices of her fierce and ignorant bigotry that the cultivators of the elegant and humanizing arts would seek encouragement or protection. Gardiner indeed, where particular prejudices did not interfere, was inclined to favor the learned; and Ascham owed to him the place of Latin secretary. Cardinal Pole also, himself a scholar, was desirous to support, as much as present circumstances would permit, his ancient character of a patron of scholars, and he earnestly pleaded with sir Thomas Pope to provide for the teaching of Greek as well as Latin in his college; but sir Thomas persisted in his opinion that a Latin professorship was sufficient, considering the general decay of erudition in the country, which had caused an almost total cessation of the study of the Greek language.

It was in the department of English poetry alone that any perceptible advance was effected or prepared during this deplorable æra; and it was to the vigorous genius of one man, whose vivid personifications of abstract beings were then quite unrivalled, and have since been rarely excelled in our language, and whose clear, copious, and forcible style of poetic narrative interested all readers, and inspired a whole school of writers who worked upon his model, that this advance is chiefly to be attributed. This benefactor to our literature was Thomas Sackville, son of sir Richard Sackville, an eminent member of queen Mary's council, and second-cousin to the lady Elizabeth by his paternal grandmother, who was a Boleyn. The time of his birth is doubtful, some placing it in 1536, others as early as 1527. He studied first at Oxford and afterwards at Cambridge, distinguishing himself at both universities by the vivacity of his parts and the excellence of his compositions both in verse and prose. According to the custom of that age, which required that an English gentleman should acquaint himself intimately with the laws of his country before he took a seat amongst her legislators, he next entered himself of the Inner Temple, and about the last year of Mary's reign he served in parliament. But at this early period of life poetry had more charms for Sackville than law or politics; and following the bent of his genius, he first produced "Gorboduc," confessedly the earliest specimen of regular tragedy in our language; but which will be noticed with more propriety when we reach the period of its representation before queen Elizabeth. He then, about the year 1557 as is supposed, laid the plan of an extensive work to be called "A Mirror for Magistrates;" of which the design is thus unfolded in a highly poetical "Induction."

The poet wandering forth on a winter's evening, and taking occasion from the various objects which "told the cruel season," to muse on the melancholy changes of human affairs, and especially on the reverses incident to greatness, suddenly encounters a "piteous wight," clad all in black, who was weeping, sighing, and wringing her hands, in such lamentable guise, that

 
"–never man did see
A wight but half so woe-begone as she."
 

Struck with grief and horror at the view, he earnestly requires her to "unwrap" her woes, and inform him who and whence she is, since her anguish, if not relieved, must soon put an end to her life. She answers,

 
"Sorrow am I, in endless torments pained
Among the furies in th' infernal lake:"
 

from these dismal regions she is come, she says, to bemoan the luckless lot of those

 
"Whom Fortune in this maze of misery,
Of wretched chance most woful Mirrors chose:"
 

and she ends by inviting him to accompany her in her return:

 
"Come, come, quoth she, and see what I shall show,
Come hear the plaining and the bitter bale
Of worthy men by Fortune's overthrow:
Come thou and see them ruing all in row.
They were but shades that erst in mind thou rolled,
Come, come with me, thine eyes shall then behold."
 

He accepts the invitation, having first done homage to Sorrow as to a goddess, since she had been able to read his thought. The scenery and personages are now chiefly copied from the sixth book of the Æneid; but with the addition of many highly picturesque and original touches.

The companions enter, hand in hand, a gloomy wood, through which Sorrow only could have found the way.

 
"But lo, while thus amid the desert dark
We passed on with steps and pace unmeet,
A rumbling roar, confused with howl and bark
Of dogs, shook all the ground beneath our feet,
And struck the din within our ears so deep,
As half distraught unto the ground I fell;
Besought return, and not to visit hell."
 

His guide however encourages him, and they proceed by the "lothly lake" Avernus,

 
"In dreadful fear amid the dreadful place."
 
 
"And first within the porch and jaws of hell
Sat deep Remorse of Conscience, all besprent
With tears; and to herself oft would she tell
Her wretchedness, and cursing never stent
To sob and sigh: but ever thus lament
With thoughtful care, as she that all in vain
Should wear and waste continually in pain.
 
 
Her eyes, unsteadfast rolling here and there,
Whirled on each place as place that vengeance brought,
So was her mind continually in fear,
Tossed and tormented with tedious thought
Of those detested crimes that she had wrought:
With dreadful cheer and looks thrown to the sky,
Longing for death, and yet she could not die.
 
 
Next saw we Dread, all trembling how he shook
With foot uncertain proffered here and there,
Benumbed of speech, and with a ghastly look
Searched every place, all pale and dead with fear,
His cap borne up with staring of his hair." &c.
 

All the other allegorical personages named, and only named, by Virgil, as well as a few additional ones, are pourtrayed in succession, and with the same strength and fullness of delineation; but with the exception of War, who appears in the attributes of Mars, they are represented simply as examples of Old age, Malady, &c., not as the agents by whom these evils are inflicted upon others. Cerberus and Charon occur in their appropriate offices, but the monstrous forms Gorgon, Chimæra, &c., are judiciously suppressed; and the poet is speedily conducted to the banks of that "main broad flood"

 
"Which parts the gladsome fields from place of woe."
"With Sorrow for my guide, as there I stood,
A troop of men the most in arms bedight,
In tumult clustered 'bout both sides the flood:
'Mongst whom, who were ordained t' eternal night,
Or who to blissful peace and sweet delight,
I wot not well, it seemed that they were all
Such as by death's untimely stroke did fall."
 

Sorrow acquaints him that these are all illustrious examples of the reverses which he was lately deploring, who will themselves relate to him their misfortunes; and that he must afterwards

 
"Recount the same to Kesar, king and peer."
 

The first whom he sees advancing towards him from the throng of ghosts is Henry duke of Buckingham, put to death under Richard III.: and his "Legend," or story, is unfortunately the only one which its author ever found leisure to complete; the favor of his illustrious kinswoman on her accession causing him to sink the poet in the courtier, the ambassador, and finally the minister of state. But he had already done enough to earn himself a lasting name amongst the improvers of poetry in England. In tragedy he gave the first regular model; in personification he advanced far beyond all his predecessors, and furnished a prototype to that master of allegory, Spenser. A greater than Spenser has also been indebted to him; as will be evident, I think, to all who compare the description of the figures on the shield of war in his Induction, and especially those of them which relate to the siege of Troy, with the exquisitely rich and vivid description of a picture on that subject in Shakespeare's early poem on Tarquin and Lucretia.

The legend of the duke of Buckingham is composed in a style rich, free and forcible; the examples brought from ancient history, of the suspicion and inward wretchedness to which tyrants have ever been a prey, and afterwards, of the instability of popular favor, might in this age be accounted tedious and pedantic; they are however pertinent, well recited, and doubtless possessed the charm of novelty with respect to the majority of contemporary readers. The curses which the unhappy duke pours forth against the dependent who had betrayed him, may almost compare, in the energy and inventiveness of malice, with those of Shakespeare's queen Margaret; but they lose their effect by being thrown into the form of monologue and ascribed to a departed spirit, whose agonies of grief and rage in reciting his own death have something in them bordering on the burlesque.

The mind of Sackville was deeply fraught, as we have seen, with classic stores; and at a time when England possessed as yet no complete translation of Virgil, he might justly regard it as a considerable service to the cause of national taste to transplant into our vernacular poetry some scattered flowers from his rich garden of poetic sweets. Thus he has embellished his legend with an imitation or rather paraphrase of the celebrated description of night in the fourth book of the Æneid. The lines well merit transcription.

 
"Midnight was come, when ev'ry vital thing
With sweet sound sleep their weary limbs did rest;
The beasts were still, the little birds that sing
Now sweetly slept besides their mother's breast,
The old and all were shrowded in their nest;
The waters calm, the cruel seas did cease;
The woods, the fields, and all things held their peace.
 
 
The golden stars were whirled amid their race,
And on the earth did laugh with twinkling light,
When each thing nestled in his resting place
Forgat day's pain with pleasure of the night:
The hare had not the greedy hounds in sight;
The fearful deer had not the dogs in doubt,
The partridge dreamt not of the falcon's foot.
 
 
The ugly bear now minded not the stake,
Nor how the cruel mastives do him tear;
The stag lay still unroused from the brake;
The foamy boar feared not the hunter's spear:
All things were still in desert, bush and breer.
With quiet heart now from their travails ceast
Soundly they slept in midst of all their rest."
 

The allusion to bear-bating in the concluding stanza may offend the delicacy of a modern reader; but let it be remembered that in the days of Mary, and even of Elizabeth, this amusement was accounted "sport for ladies."

The "Mirror for Magistrates" was not lost to the world by the desertion of Sackville from the service of the muses; for a similar or rather perhaps the same design was entertained, and soon after carried into execution, by other and able though certainly inferior hands.

During the reign of Mary,—but whether before or after the composition of Sackville's Induction does not appear,—a certain printer, having communicated to several "worshipful and honorable persons" his intention of republishing Lydgate's translation in verse of Boccacio's "Fall of Princes," was by them advised to procure a continuation of the work, chiefly in English examples; and he applied in consequence to Baldwyne, an ecclesiastic and graduate of Oxford. Baldwyne declined to embark alone in so vast a design, and one, as he thought, so little likely to prove profitable; but seven other contemporary poets, of whom George Ferrers has already been mentioned as one, having promised their assistance, he consented to assume the editorship of the work. The general frame agreed upon by these associates was that employed in the original work of Boccacio, who feigned, that a party of friends being assembled, it was determined that each of them should contribute to the pleasure of the company by personating some illustrious and unfortunate character, and relating his adventures in the first person. A contrivance so tame and meagre compared with the descent to the regions of the dead sketched with so much spirit by Sackville, that it must have preceded, in all probability, their knowledge at least of his performance. The first part of the work, almost entirely by Baldwyne, was written, and partly printed, in Mary's time, but its publication was prevented by the interference of the lord-chancellor,—a trait of the mean and cowardly jealousy of the administration, which speaks volumes. In the first year of Elizabeth lord Stafford, an enlightened patron of letters, procured a licence for its appearance. A second part soon followed, in which Sackville's Induction and Legend were inserted. The success of this collection was prodigious; edition after edition was given to the public under the inspection of different poetical revisers, by each of whom copious additions were made to the original work. Its favor and reputation continued during all the reign of Elizabeth, and far into that of James; for Mr. Warton tells us that in Chapman's "May-day," printed in 1611, "a gentleman of the most elegant taste for reading and highly accomplished in the current books of the times, is called 'one that has read Marcus Aurelius, Gesta Romanorum, and the Mirror of Magistrates.'²⁸"