rable impediments in the practice of those more active arts of life which alone were worthy of one of gentle blood; their fathers had been good knights without this idling toil of reading. Henry the Seventh, when Earl of Richmond, during his exile in France from 1471 to 1485, had become a reader of French romances, an admirer of French players, and an amateur of their peculiar architecture. After his accession we trace these new tastes in our poetry, our drama, and in a novel species of architecture which Bishop Fox called Burgundian, and which is the origin of the Tudor style.* A favourer of the histrionic art, he introduced a troop of French players. Wary in his pleasures as in his politics, this monarch was moderate in his patronage either of poets or players, but he was careful to encourage both. The queen participated in his tastes, and appears to have bestowed particular rewards on "players," whose performances had afforded her unusual delight; and among the curious items of her majesty's expenditure, we find that many of these players were foreigners— "a French player, an Italian poet, a Spanish tumbler, a Flemish tumbler, a Welshman for making a ryme, a maid that came out of Spain and danced before the queen. This monarch had suffered one of those royal marriages which are a tribute paid to the interests of the state. Henry had yielded with repugnance to a union with Elizabeth the Yorkist; the sullen Lancastrian long looked on his queen with the eyes of a factionist. Toward the latter years of his life this repugnance seems to have passed away, as this gentle consort largely participated in his tastes. It was probably in their sympathy that the personal prejudices of Henry melted This indeed was a triumph of the arts of imagination over the warped feelings of the individual; it marked the transition from barbaric arms to the amenities of literature, and the softening influence of the mimetic arts; it was the presage of the magnificence of his successor. The nation was benefited by these new tastes; the pacific reign made a revolution in our court, our manners, and our literature. away. We may date from this period that happy intercourse which the learned English opened with the Continent, and more particularly with literary Italy; our learned travellers now * Speed's History, 995. appear in number. Colet, the founder of St. Paul's School, not only passed over to Paris, but lingered in Italy, and returned home with the enthusiasm of classical antiquity. Grocyn, to acquire the true pronunciation of the Greek, which he first taught at Oxford, domesticated with Demetrius Chalcondyles and Angelo Politian, at Florence. Linacre, the projector of the College of Physicians, visited Rome and Florence. Lilly the grammarian we find at Rhodes and at Rome, and the learned Pace at Padua. We were thus early great literary travellers; and the happier Continentalists, who rarely move from their native homes, have often wondered at the restless condition of those whom they have sometimes reproached as being Insulaires; yet they may be reminded that we have done no more than the most ancient philosophers of antiquity. Our reproachers fortunately possessed the arts, and even the learning, which we were willing by travel and costs to acquire. "The Islanders" may have combined all the knowledge of all the world, a freedom and enlargement of the mind, which those, however more fortunately placed, can rarely possess, who restrict their locality, and narrow their comprehension by their own home-bound limits. The king, delighting in poetry, fostered an English muse in the learned rhyme of STEPHEN HAWES, who was admitted to his private chamber, for the pleasure which Henry experienced in listening to poetic recitation. It was probably the taste of his royal master which inspired this bard's allegorical romance of chivalry, of love, and of science. This elaborate work is, "The Pastime of Pleasure, or the History of Graunde Amour and la bel Pucel, containing the knowledge of the seven sciences and the course of man's life." At a time when sciences had no reality, they were constantly alluding to them; ignorance hardily imposed its erudition; and experimental philosophy only terminated in necromancy. The seven sciences of the accomplished gentleman were those so well known, comprised in the scholastic distich. 66 In the ideal hero "Graunde Amour," is shadowed forth the education of a complete gentleman of that day. From the Tower of Doctrine," to the Castle of "Chivalry," the way lies equally open, but the progress is diversified by many byepaths, and a number of personified ideas or allegorical characters. These shadowy actors lead to shadowy places; but the abounding incidents relieve us among this troop of passionless creatures. This fiction blends allegory with romance, and science with chivalry. At the early period of printing, it was probably the first volume which called in the graver's art to heighten the inventions of the writer, and the accompanying wood-cuts are an evidence of the elegant taste of the author, although that morose critic of all poesy, honest Anthony à Wood, sar castically concludes that these cuts were "to enable the reader to understand the story better." This once courtly volume, our sage reports, "is now thought but worthy of a ballad-monger's stall."* The Pastime of Pleasure" was even despised by that great book-collector, General Lord Fairfax, who, on the copy he possessed, has left a memorandum that it should be changed for a better book!" The fate of books vacillates with the fancies of book-lovers, and the im provements of a later age. In the days of Fairfax, the gloom of the civil wars annihilated their imaginations. 66 66 But the gorgeousness of this romance struck the Gothic fancy of the historian of our poetry, magic, chivalry, and allegory! In the circumstantial analysis of Warton, the reader may pursue his course of man's life" through the windings of the labyrinth. It seems as if the patience of the critic had sought a relief amid his prolonged chronicle of obscure versifiers, in a production of imagination, the only one which had appeared since Chaucer, and which, to the contemplative poetic antiquary, showed him the infant rudiments of the future Spenser. This allegorical romance is imbued with Provençal fancy, and probably emulated the "Roman de la Rose," which could not fail to be a favourite with the royal patron, among those * This forlorn volume of Anthony's "Stalls" is now a gem placed in the caskets of black-letter. This poetic romance, by its excessive rarity,-the British Museum is without a copy,-has obtained most extraordinary prices among our collectors. A copy of the first edition at the Roxburgh sale reached 847., which was sold at Sir M. M. Sykes' for half the price; later editions, for a fourth. A copy was sold at Heber's sale for 251. It may, however, relieve the distress of some curious readers to be informed that it may now be obtained at the most ordinary cost of books. Mr. SOUTHEY, with excellent judgment, has preserved the romance in his valuable volume of "Specimens of our Ancient Poets," from the time of Chaucer; it is to be regretted, however, that the text is not correctly printed, and that the poem has suffered mutilation-six thousand lines seem to have exhausted the patience of the modern typographer. French books which he loved. Fertile in invention, it is however of the old stock; fresh meads and delicious gardens,ladies in arbours,-magical trials of armed knights on horses of steel, which, touched by a secret spring, could represent a tourney. We strike the shield at the castle-gate of chivalry, and we view the golden roof of the hall, lighted up by a carbuncle of prodigious size; we repose in chambers, walled with silver, and enamelling many a story. There are many noble conceptions among the allegorical gentry. She, whom Graunde Amour first beheld was mounted on her palfrey, flying with the wind, encircled with tongues of fire, and her two milkwhite greyhounds, on whose golden collars are inscribed in diamond letters, Grace and Governance. She is Fame, her palfrey is Pegasus, and her burning tongues are the voice of Posterity! There are some grotesque incidents, as in other romances; a monster wildly created, the offspring of Disdain and Strangeness-a demon composed of the seven metals! We have also a dwarf who has to encounter a giant with seven heads; our subdolous David mounts on twelve steps cut in the rock; and to the surprise of the giant, he discovered in "the boy whom he had mocked," his equal in stature, and his vanquisher, notwithstanding the inconceivable roar of his seven heads! Warton transcribed a few lines to show this poet's "harmonious versification and clear expression;" but this short specimen may convey an erroneous notion. Our verse was yet irregular, and its modulation was accidental rather than settled; the metrical lines of Hawes, for the greater part, must be read rhythmically, it was a barbarism that even later poets still retained. He also affected an ornate diction; and Latin and French terms cast an air of pedantry, more particularly when the euphony of his verse is marred by closing his lines with his elongated polysyllables; he probably imagined that the dimensions of his words necessarily lent a grandeur to his thoughts. With all these defects, Hawes often surpasses himself, and we may be surprised, that in a poem composed in the court of Henry the Seventh, about 1506, the poet should have left us such a minutely-finished picture of female beauty, as he has given La Pucelle; Hawes had been in Italy, and seems with an artist's eye to have dwelt on some picture of Raphael, in his early manner, or of his master Perugino, in his hard but elaborate style. "Her shining hair, so properly she dresses, With vaynés blewe, in which the bloude ranne in ; The reign of Henry the Seventh was a misty morning of our vernacular literature, but it was the sunrise; and though the road be rough, we discover a few names by which we may begin to count,—as we find on our way a mile-stone, which, however rudely cut and worn out, serves to measure our distances. FIRST SOURCES OF MODERN HISTORY. SOCIETY must have considerably advanced ere it could have produced an historical record; and who could have furnished even the semblance but the most instructed class, in the enjoyment of uninterrupted leisure, among every people? History therefore remained long a consecrated thing in the hands of the priesthood, from the polytheistical era of the Roman Pontiffs who registered their annals, to the days that the history of Christian Europe became chronicled by the monastic orders.* Had it not been for the monks, exclaimed our learned Marsham, we should not have had a history of England. + Archbishop Plagmund superintended the Saxon Annals to the year 891. The first Chronicles, those of Kent or Wessex, were regularly continued by the Archbishops of Canterbury, or by their directions, as far as 1000, or even 1070.-The Rev. Dr. Ingram's preface to the Saxon Chronicle. These were our earliest Chronicles; the Britons possibly never wrote any. |