"For ingrained habits, dyed with often dips, O where's your sweaty habit, when each ape Without much do or far-fetched habiture? To salve the soul's dread wounds; Omnipotent There is perhaps no passage in the satire of the period that approaches so nearly to the spirit of Persius. For Persius is the master whom Marston is always attempting to copy, though with but a scant measure of success. It was easier from the lofty, if arrogant, platform of Stoicism to take a measure of the decaying morals of the Roman State, than to apply the narrow theological dogmas of Calvin to the swelling tide of national life in the England of Elizabeth. To imitate the external manner of the Roman satirist was unfortunately a less difficult task; and his studied harshness, obscurity, and violence of metaphor, are reproduced in Marston with all the ill-judged admiration of a copyist. Marston's satirical style is stuffed with sudden apostrophes, abrupt questions, interjections, such as "What!" "How now?" "Fie, fie!" "Tush!" "But ho!" etc., etc. In order to contrast himself with the smooth sonneteers of the time, he affects a rugged contempt for harmony : Then hence, base ballad stuff! my poetry Thy interest in sacred poesy; Thou to invention add'st but surquedry, A gaudy ornature, but hast no part He chooses also the coarsest and harshest terms, by way of displaying his contempt for false refinement. "Putrid slime," "guzzel dogs," "yerking rhyme," "slubbered devotion," "rezed bacon," "dunghill peasants," "belching blasphemy," "to lusk," "jobbernoule," "muddy scum," are the kind of phrases with which he attempts to add force and character to his verse. When he speaks of a class of persons, his habit is to tack the syllable "an" on to any proper name-for example, "Priapian," "Janian,” “Adrastian," "Lamians," Briarians," "Aquinians"; and by tricks like these he fancied that his poetry acquired an air of originality. On the whole, Ben Jonson, who ridiculed this satirist's mannerisms with great effect, judged his merits justly in the title of the play which contains the character of Crispinus. Marston was a "poetaster," with sufficient intelligence to perceive the drift of public taste, but with more skill than sufficed to gratify that taste with brazen impudence, loud tones, and glaring colours. He is always striking an attitude to call attention to himself. At one time he invokes the aid of Melancholy : Thou nursing mother of fair Wisdom's lore, Ingenuous Melancholy, I implore Thy grave assistance: take thy gloomy seat- At another he dedicates his satires "to Everlasting 1 Satire iv. 2 On his tombstone in the Temple Church was the inscription "Oblivioni Sacrum." Thou mighty gulf, insatiate cormorant, Devour me quick, accept my orison, My earnest prayers, which do importune thee, Theatrical appeals like these, followed by a general invective against vice, come to very little. What can be an easier form of satire than to suppose one's age a seething mass of corruption, and one's self inspired by hatred of villainy to unmask the shows and hypocrisies by which one is surrounded? Marston's indiscriminate attack on everything and everybody resulted in monotonous repetitions. He has left behind him no single portrait which (and this, in the eyes of posterity, is the best justification of satire) helps to preserve in verse the standard of moral truth, or an image of the manners and characters of the time. CHAPTER V THE TRANSLATORS UNDER ELIZABETH AND JAMES I. SIR JOHN HARINGTON: EDWARD FAIRFAX: JOSHUA SYLVESTER : GEORGE CHAPMAN: GEORGE SANDYS WHILE the course of English culture thus followed a line of inward native development, the volume of our poetry was swelled, and its mixed character rendered still more complex, by ideas imported into it from without, through translations of the most famous poems of classical antiquity, or of modern works which had attained a wide celebrity on the continent of Europe. I have already traced this movement of translation in its initial stages during the reign of Henry VIII. and the first years of Elizabeth: the revival of the translating impulse at the close of the reign of the last of the Tudors, and under the first of the Stuarts, is important, for the purposes of history, both as showing a change of spirit since the earlier period in the minds of the translators themselves, and also on account of the influence which their work exerted on the character of later original composition. The first translation which it is necessary to mention is that of the Orlando Furioso by Sir John Harington. This poet was born in 1561. He was the son of Sir John Harington and his second wife, Isabella Markham, and was educated at Eton and Christ's College, Cambridge. He studied law at Lincoln's Inn, but most of his time seems to have been spent at Court, where, to amuse his companions, he translated the episode of Giocondo from the 28th canto of the Orlando Furioso. The Queen, who was his godmother, reproved him for his attempt to corrupt the morals of her ladies, and ordered him to leave the Court, and as a punishment, to translate in his own house the whole of the Orlando Furioso. His task accomplished, he returned to Court in 1591, but irrepressible in his wit, he scattered epigrams right and left, and in 1596 was again expelled, having incurred the Queen's anger through a satire called The Metamorphosis of Ajax, which was supposed to contain some reflections on the Earl of Leicester. He accompanied Essex into Ireland in 1598, and returned with the Earl when the latter sought to excuse himself to the Queen after the expedition againt Tyrone. Elizabeth received him harshly, and bade him "go home." "I did not stay," says Harington, "to be bidden twice: if all the Irish rebels had been at my heels, I should not have had better speed; for I did now flee from one whom I both loved and feared too." 1 To propitiate the Queen, he afterwards put into her hands a journal which he kept of Essex's proceedings in Ireland, thus saving himself by the sacrifice of his chief. When the Queen was dying he sent, as a New Year's gift, to James VI. in Scotland, a lantern constructed so as to typify the waning splendour of Elizabeth and the glory that was to come; at the same time he published a tract defending the claims of James to the throne of England against those of the Spanish Infanta. In spite of this flattery, he was unable for some time to gain the ear of the new king; but he eventually seems to have been appointed tutor to Prince Henry, whose favour he contrived to retain till his own death in 1612 at Kelston, the country seat which his father had acquired by his marriage with his first wife, Joanna Dyngley, a natural daughter of Henry VIII. In the last volume I dwelt upon the character of the Orlando Furioso. I showed that remarkable poem to be the product of the sceptical, contemplative, and humorous 1 Nuge Antique (1804), vol. i. p. 356. |