NOTES

I

THIS descant upon one of the most glorious feats of arms that even England has achieved is selected and pieced together from the magnificent verse assigned to the Chorus- Enter RUMOUR painted full of tongues'-to King Henry V., the noble piece of pageantry produced in 1598, and a famous number from the Poems Lyrick and Pastorall (circ. 1605) of Michael Drayton. 'Look,' says Ben Jonson, in his Vision on the Muses of his Friend, Michael Drayton :

Look how we read the Spartans were inflamed
With bold Tyrtæus' verse; when thou art named
So shall our English youths urge on, and cry
An AGINCOURT! an AGINCOURT! or die.

This, it is true, was in respect of another Agincourt, but we need not hesitate to appropriate it to our own: in respect of which-'To the Cambro-Britons and their Harp, His Ballad of Agincourt,' is the poet's own description-it is to note that Drayton had no model for it; that it remains wellnigh unique in English letters for over two hundred years; and that, despite such lapses into doggerel as the third stanza, and some curious infelicities of diction which need not here be specified, it remains, with a certain Sonnet, its author's chief title to fame. Compare the ballads of The Brave Lord Willoughby and The Honour of Bristol in the seventeenth century, the song of The Arethusa in the eighteenth, and in the nineteenth a choice of such Tyrtæan music as The Battle of the Baltic, Lord Tennyson's Ballad of the Fleet, and The Red Thread of Honour of the late Sir Francis Doyle.

II

Originally The True Character of a Happy Life: written and printed about 1614, and reprinted by Percy (1765) from the Reliquia Wottoniane of 1651. Says Drummond of Ben Jonson, 'Sir Edward (sic) Wotton's verses of a Happy Life he hath by heart.' Of Wotton himself it was reserved for Cowley to remark that

He did the utmost bounds of knowledge find,

Aná found them not so large as was his mind;

And when he saw that he through all had passed
He died-lest he should idle grow at last.

See Izaak Walton, Lives.

III, IV

From Underwoods (1640). The first, An Ode, is addressed to an innominate not yet, I believe, identified. The second is part of that Ode to the Immortal Memory of that Heroic Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Morrison, which is the first true Pindaric in the language. Gifford ascribes it to 1629, when Sir Henry died, but it seems not to have been printed before 1640. Sir Lucius Cary is the Lord Falkland of Clarendon and Horace Walpole.

V

From The Mad Lover (produced about 1618: published in 1640). Compare the wooden imitations of Dryden in Amboyna and eisewhere.

VI

First printed, Mr. Bullen tells me, in 1640. Compare X. (Shirley, post, p. 20), and the cry from Raleigh's History of the World: O Eloquent, Just, and Mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none hath dared, thou hast done; and whom all the World hath flattered, thou only hast cast out of the World and despised: thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched Greatness, all the Pride, Cruelty, and Ambition of Man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, "Hic Facet."

VII, VIII

This pair of 'noble numbers,' of brilliant and fervent lyrics, is from Hesperides, or, The Works both Human and Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. (1648).

IX

No. 61, 'Vertue,' in The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations, 1632-33. Compare Herbert to Christopher Farrer, as reported by Izaak Walton:-Tell him that I do not repine, but am pleased with my want of health; and tell him, my heart is fixed on that place where true joy is only to be found, and that I long to be there, and do wait for my appointed change with hope and patience.'

X

From The Contention of Ajax and Ulysses, printed 1659. Compare VI. (Beaumont, ante, p. 15), and Bacon, Essays, 'On Death':

'But, above all, believe it, the sweetest canticle is Nunc dimittis, when a man hath attained worthy ends and expectations.'

XI

Written in the November of 1637, and printed next year in the Obsequies to the Memorie of Mr. Edward King. In this Monody, the title runs, 'the Author bewails a Learned Friend unfortunately drowned in his passage from Chester on the Irish Seas, 1637. And by occasion foretells the ruine of our corrupted Clergie, then in their height.' King, who died at five- or six-andtwenty, was a personal friend of Milton's, but the true accents of grief are inaudible in Lycidas, which is, indeed, an example as perfect as exists of Milton's capacity for turning whatever he touched into pure poetry: an arrangement, that is, of the best words in the best order'; or, to go still further than Coleridge, the best words in the prescribed or inevitable sequence that makes the arrangement art. For the innumerable allusions see Professor Masson's edition of Milton (Macmillan, 1890), i. 187-201, and iii. 254-276.

XII

The Eighth Sonnet (Masson): 'When the Assault was Intended to the City. Written in 1642, with Rupert and the King at Brentford, and printed in the edition of 1645.

XIII

The Sixteenth Sonnet (Masson): To the Lord General Cromwell, May, 1652: On the Proposals of Certain Ministers at the Committee for Propagation of the Gospel.' Printed by Philips, Life of Milton, 1694. In defence of the principle of Religious Voluntaryism, and against the intolerant Fifteen Proposals of John Owen and the majority of the Committee.

XIV

The Eighteenth Sonnet (Masson). 'Written in 1655,' says Masson, and referring to the persecution instituted, in the early part of the year, by Charles Emmanuel 11., Duke of Savoy and Prince of Piedmont, against his Protestant subjects of the valleys of the Cottian Alps.' In January, an edict required them to turn Romanists or quit the country out of hand; it was enforced with such barbarity that Cromwell took the case of the sufferers in hand; and so vigorous was his action that the Edict was withdrawn and a convention was signed (August 1655) by which the Vaudois were permitted to worship as they would. Printed in 1673.

XV

The Nineteenth Sonnet (Masson) 'may have been written any time between 1652 and 1655,' the first years of Milton's blindness, 'but it follows the Sonnet on the Piedmontese Massacre in Milton's own volume of 1673.'

XVI, XVII

From the choric parts of Samson Agonistes (i.e. the Agonist, or Wrestler), first printed in 1671.

XVIII

Of uncertain date; first printed by Watson 1706-11. The version given here is Emerson's (which is shorter than the original), with the exception of the last stanza, which is Napier's (Montrose, i. Appendices). Napier is at great pains to prove that the ballad is allegorical, and that Montrose's dear and only love' was that unhappy King whose Epitaph, the famous Great, Good, and Just, he is saidfalsely to have written with his sword. Be this as it may, the verses have a second part, which has dropped into oblivion. For the Great Marquis, who reminded De Retz of the men in Plutarch's Lives, was not averse from the practice of poetry, and wrote, besides these numbers, a prayer (Let them bestow on every airth a limb'), a 'pasquil,' a pleasant string of conceits in praise of woman, a set of vehement and fiery memorial stanzas on the King, and one copy of verses more.

XIX, XX

To Lucasta going to the Wars and To Althea from Prison are both, I believe, from Lovelace's Lucasta (1645).

XXI

First printed by Captain Thomson, Works (1776), from a copy he held, on what seems excellent authority, to be in Marvell's hand. The true title is A Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return from Ireland (1650). It is always ascribed to Marvell (whose verse was first collected and printed by his widow in 1681), but there are faint doubts as to the authorship.

XXII

Poems (1681). This elegant and romantic lyric appears to have been inspired by a passage in the life of John Oxenbridge, of whom, 'religionis causa oberrantem,' it is enough to note that,

after migrating to Bermudas, where he had a church, and being 'ejected at the Restoration from an English cure, he went to Surinam (1662-67), to Barbadoes (1667), and to New England (1669), where he was made pastor of 'the First Church of Boston (1670), and where he died in 1674. These details are from Mr. Grosart's Marvell (1875), i. 82–85, and ii. 5-8.

XXIII

Dryden's second Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day, Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Sound, as it is called, was written and printed in 1697. As it was designed for music (it was set by Jeremiah Clarke), the closing lines of every strophe are repeated by way of chorus. I have removed these repetitions as impertinent to the effect of the poem in print, and as interrupting the rushing vehemency of the narrative. The incident described is the burning of Persepolis.

XXIV

Written early in 1782, in memory of Robert Levett: 'an old and faithful friend,' says Johnson, and withal 'a very useful and very blameless man.' Excepting for the perfect odes of Cowper (post, pp. 85, 86), in these excellent and affecting verses the 'classic' note is audible for the last time in this book until we reach the Iphigeneia of Walter Savage Landor, who was a lad of seven at the date of their composition. They were written seventeen years after the publication of the Reliques (1765), and a full quarter century after the appearance of The Bard (1757); but in style they proceed from the age of Pope. For the rest, the Augustan Muse was an utter stranger to the fighting inspiration. Her gait was pedestrian, her purpose didactic, her practice neat and formal: and she prosed of England's greatest captain, the victor of Blenheim, as tamely as himself had been 'a parson in a tye-wig-himself, and not the amiable man of letters who acted as her amanuensis for the nonce.

XXV

Chevy Chase is here preferred to Otterbourne as appealing more directly to Englishmen. The text is Percy's, and the movement, like that of all the English ballads, is jog-trot enough. Sidney's confession-that he never heard it, even from a blind fiddler, but it stirred him like the sound of a trumpet-refers, no doubt, to an earlier version than the present, which appears to date from the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Compare The Brave Lord Willoughby and The Honour of Bristol (post, pp. 60,73).