or from other books to which we have no means of reference, must of course be left to conjecture.

I will now proceed to make a few remarks on the obligations of some others amongst our poets to the Greek drama; only requesting the reader not to expect, that all the assertions made here, or elsewhere, will receive confirmation from the perusal of the illustrations to any single play.

The idioms which are to be met with in the works of Chaucer, may possibly be the result of his own knowledge of Greek, as both he and Gower received the best education which the universities of that day afforded; but this, as far as Greek was concerned, was in all probability so limited, that I should be rather inclined to attribute them to another source his residence in Italy, and knowledge of Italian;' in which language, no doubt, many Greek phrases were at that time to be found, in consequence of the constant intercourse of the Italians with the Byzantine Greeks. Chaucer was also acquainted with the works of Boccacio and Petrarch, if not, as some have supposed, with the latter personally, and these two writers were principal agents in the revival of the study of the old Greek learning in Italy. As there are very few of these idioms appearing in our early writers, which are

I See Hallam's History of Literature, vol. i. p. 127.

not also to be found in Chaucer, this may be considered a sufficient reason for their introduction up to the period when Greek was so much studied in England as to permit us to account for their occurrence in a more natural way. There are also, I should add, originally, several figurative expressions in common between the earlier English and the Greek, as may easily be ascertained by a careful examination of any good version of Anglo-Saxon

poems.

Though the name of Spenser will frequently be found in my extracts, it will, for the most part, be in connection with some passage proving his general scholarship; some phrase, sentiment, or allusion, then beginning to be current among the better order of scholars of his day, rather than any thing necessarily arising from a study of the Greek dramatists. It would be a waste of time to speak of Milton in connection with this subject; and of Ben Jonson, and our earlier dramatists, enough has already been said. Perhaps, however, I ought to mention the "Four grand monarchic tragedies of William earl of Stirling"-written at the time, and probably after the taste of James the First, of whom he appears to have been a favourite. They consist of a strange mixture of philosophy and punning, being entirely destitute of action, and composed of a series of

moral reflections on the destinies of Croesus, Darius, Alexander, and Julius Cæsar. I speak of him principally, as using a greater number of the juxtapositions so much affected by the Greek tragedians, than any other English writer has done."

More worthy of notice are Daniel and Cowley, the extracts from whom contain the strongest internal evidences of imitation. The passages chosen by Daniel have no particular characteristic; those of Cowley, as many who are acquainted with his writings may anticipate, are principally from Æschylus. There is no great difficulty in supposing that, in his love of the oblique and the whimsical, Cowley mistook the audacity of the Greek for ingenuity, or at any rate thought, that, when disguised in an English dress, his thoughts might be made to appear the result of that faculty; and in this he has been tolerably successful. He makes the craggs on which Æschylus has alit in his wild flight, appear as so many points accidentally touched at in his own sinuous and irregular course; indeed, as far as deviation from the ordinary road of language and metaphor is concerned,

m

Such, I mean, as that of the substantive in immediate connection with its opposite; of the same substantive in different cases; of the verb, whether transitive or neuter, with its cognate substantive; of the adjective with the derivative adverb; of the same adjective in different cases; of the verb with its own participle, or with that of its opposite; of the same word, simple and compounded, &c.

he has often crept farther than Eschylus has flown. The resemblances are far too frequent, and too strongly marked, to allow of their being attributed to accident; to which I assign certain striking metaphorical resemblances in the writings of Sydney, Quarles, and Herbert-poets, for whom the term quaint is just, as far as it goes: though not sufficiently favourable or discriminating, their characteristic is a most industrious fancy, without, at any rate in the case of two of them, any corrective taste; for the expression of their thoughts, the received metaphors and ordinary poetical diction of the day was wholly inadequate. I think there was also a defect of the imitative power; and in the case of Sydney, wilful eccentricity, and an effort at fantastic and courtly writing. It is however to their fancifulness and independence that I owe many parallels, which I could scarcely have expected to meet with in the whole body of English poetry.

Though Dryden was the author of a plan for contrasting the Greek and English stage, I suspect he knew little of the former beyond the two Edipi, and perhaps the Antigone, which he studied, either in the original, or by translation, for the materials of his play of Edipus. He was, according to his own account, no great admirer of the Greek drama; and what he has borrowed may, for the most part,

be traced to the three sources mentioned above. Lee, his coadjutor, comes sometimes very near the Greek tragedians: his style and expressions are so bold, as often to border on the Eschylean; but as Lee was a bold plagiarist, as well as a bold writer, pillaging in all directions, by the page oftener than by the line, he would scarcely have left us in doubt as to his debts to the Greek drama, had they been many.

From the time of the death of Dryden, and even before that period, the sympathy between the Greek and English languages is greatly diminished; the more varied constructions, and bolder metaphors, gradually disappear, and an increasing preference for the Latin language, and imitation of the Latin poets, becomes more and more visible. During that period of English literature called after queen Anne, but extending considerably beyond her reign, we need not hesitate in saying, that the proportion of Latin and Greek scholars was as twenty to

one.

The bulk of the poetry of this age consists of translations and imitations of the Latin poets; moral essays, with many allusions to the immediate topics of the day; satires and fables, lashing the prevalent forms of vice or folly; long epistles to noble friends; pastorals, ballads, and birthday odes. To

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