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passe in the latyne, and yet shalt have moch worke to translate it wel-faveredly, so that it have the same grace and swetnesse, sence and pure vnderstandinge with it in the latyne, as it hath in the hebrue.

THOMAS CRANMER (1489-1556).-Cranmer's fine work on the Prayer Book has been alluded to already. He became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533, his convenient views on the king's marriage with Catherine of Aragon having won the royal favour. In the king's later matrimonial affairs Cranmer showed himself equally pliant. His conduct towards the unfortunate Protector Somerset, in the next reign, was not distinguished by courage; and the glory of his martyrdom under Mary was clouded by the weakness of his previous recantations. He wrote well in Latin and in English, and the noble English of his prayers, exhortations, and homilies enables those of his own composition to be singled out with some certainty from the devotional books and collections of homilies prepared under his authority. The English liturgy and the English Bible owe more to Cranmer than to any other individual, and are his best apologia.

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Archbishop Cranmer. (From a portrait by G. Fliccius.)

OTHER DIVINES.-Miles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, published a Bible said to be translated from the Dutch (or German) and Latin, but principally based on the Zurich Bible and Tyndale's version of the New Testament. It contained the Apocrypha, and the edition of 1535 was the first complete edition of the Scriptures printed in English. A revised edition appeared in 1539, and is known to history as the Great Bible. The edition of 1540, which contained a preface by the archbishop, was known as Cranmer's Bible. This formed one of the main English foundations of our Authorized Version. Coverdale's finest memorial is the Psalter in the English Prayer Book, unsurpassed in its rhythmical beauty. Bishop Latimer (? 1481-1555), who suffered martyrdom with Ridley, was noted for the vigour and homely picturesqueness of his sermons-" On the Card," On the Ploughers," etc.-of which only defective copies have come down to us. Much more voluminous are the works left by the Scots reformer John Knox, comprising sermons, tracts, including the notorious Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women that provoked Elizabeth's ire, and the posthumous History of the Reformation in Scotland. The Rerum Scoticarum Historia and other works of his compatriot, the great scholar and reformer George Buchanan, are nearly all in Latin, and have little to do with English literary history.

ARTISTIC PROSE

The Beginnings of Style in Prose. The efforts to elaborate a prose style having intrinsic charms parallel to those of verse continued after Berners; but a really distinctive form of prose was not evolved till the beginning of the Elizabethan Euphuism was not any one man's invention, though it owes its name to

era.

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Lyly's book. There are alliterative and antithetical turns of speech, and other anticipations of Lyly's style, in Latimer, in Ascham, and in the translators who were now becoming more than ever industrious. Gosson's Schoole of Abuse (1579), Saintsbury points out, shows" that he must rather have mastered the Lylian style in the same circumstances as Lyly, than have borrowed it from his fellow at Oxford." In 1576, two years before Euphues, George Pettie, in his Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, displayed all the preciosities of the euphuistic dialect, and is acclaimed by one critic at least as the real creator of euphuism, Lyly being dismissed as a mere imitator. At all events, Euphues gave the most extravagant and at the same

time the most successful form of a decorative style which may seem wearisome and absurd to modern readers, but which eventually had a salutary and far-reaching effect on the growth of English prose.

His

JOHN LYLY (?1554-1606).-Lyly's dramatic works do not concern us here. importance at this stage lies in his brilliant experiment of a new prose and a new fiction. Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit (1578), with its sequel, Euphues and his England (1580), is often called "the first English novel "-a phrase that depends upon our definitions. Euphues was really a new hybrid, and, like other hybrids, ! never had any issue. Its serious didactic tone and the peculiarities of its style stand in sharp contrast with the old romances and the Italian novella that was now coming in; its adoption of a philosophic attitude to contemporary life, and its 1 grave studies of character, of personal relations, and of the subtleties of emotion, herald the novel of manners. But Euphues retained far more of the essential features of the "moral court treatise," or book of worldly wisdom (such as Guevara's Libro Aureo on which it was closely modelled, and older English works like The Babees' Boke (1475), or Elyot's Gouernour and Ascham's Scholemaster), than it introduced of the more artistic ingredients, character and incident. It is not a novel, but a series

of meditative debates, with a thread of love-story serving to illustrate the author's criticisms of society. It might, indeed, be compared with such miscellanies as Addison's Spectator and Johnson's Rambler, but that the real world makes such a faint show. The characters are vague idealisms: the folly of youth, the wisdom of eld," the "fickleness of woman," these are the real dramatis personæ of this prose morality. We are told that the scene is Athens, Naples, or London, but there is no more representation of those places than when the early stage-manager put up his notice signifying where the imaginary action was laid. In his Glasse for Europe Lyly describes the British Isles in a detached and abstract way, as if he were introducing the reader to some fabulous realm in Amadis or Palmerin.

Euphuism. The Lylian style aimed at a richness, a variety of ornament, and an artificiality of structure, novel and striking to the reader, and furnishing some equivalent for the charms of metrical language. The structure was based on antithesis, accented by the rhythm of balanced clauses and by alliteration. The diction was enriched by a profusion of metaphor, simile, and other figures, for which the beasts, the magic stones, the physical and chemical affinities of a mythical science, provided material. Take it where you will, the vivacity of the style is inexhaustible:

Don Ferardo one of the chiefe gouernours of the citie, who although he had a cortly crew of gentlewomen soiourning in his pallaice, yet his daughter, heire to his whole reuenewes stayned ye beautie of them al, whose modest bashfulnes caused the other to looke wanne for enuie, whose Lilly cheekes dyed with a Vermilion red, made the rest to blush for shame. For as the finest Ruby stayneth ye coulour of the rest that be in place, or as the Sunne dimmeth the Moone, that she cannot be discerned, so this gallant girle more faire then fortunate, and yet more fortunate

then faithful, eclipsed the beautie of them all, and chaunged their colours. Vnto hir had Philautus accesse, who wan hir by right of loue, and should haue worne hir by right of law, had not Euphues by straunge destenie broken the bones of mariage, and forbidden the banes of Matrimony.

True it is Philautus that hee which toucheth the Nettle tenderly, is soonest stoung: that the Flye which playeth with the fire, is singed in the flame, that he that dalyeth with women is drawne to his woe. And as the Adamant draweth the heauie yron, the Harpe the fleete Dolphin, so beautie allureth the chast minde to loue, and the wisest witte to lust. . . . The Vine watered with Wine, is soone withered: the blossome in the fattest ground, is quickly blasted: the Goat the fatter shee is, the lesse fertile she is: yea man, the more wittie he is, the lesse happy he is.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY (1554-86).-Philip Sidney, son of the soldier and statesman Sir Henry Sidney, impressed his con

temporaries and has fascinated the modern world with a personality that seems an embodiment of the idealism, the valour, the keen intelligence, and the practical accomplishment of his age. Educated at Shrewsbury and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he formed lifelong friendships with Fulke Greville, afterwards Lord Brooke, and the poet Edward Dyer, he continued the most liberal of educations by travel on the Continent, intercourse with the leading intellects of Europe-the Huguenot Languet, William the Silent, Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese-and by the wide reading in ancient and modern authors evident in his Apologie for Poetrie. At the English court he was both admired and loved. Elizabeth petted him, but gave him no important office. He was intimate with Spenser, supported the attempts of William Webbe and Gabriel Harvey to naturalize classical metres, and took up the cudgels in defence of the theatre against the attack of Gosson in The Schoole of Abuse. He had been in love with Penelope Devereux, the "Stella" of his sonnets, who married Lord Rich, from whom she was afterwards divorced to marry her lover, the Earl of Devonshire. Sidney married Frances, daughter of Walsingham, but-in poetry at any rate-continued his addresses to " Stella." The touching episode of his death is too well known for repetition.

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Sir Philip Sidney.

Works. None of Sidney's works was printed in his lifetime. His love sonnets first appeared in a surreptitious edition in 1591, under the title of Astrophel and Stella, and were afterwards reprinted with additions in the Arcadia of 1598. His poetry, which belongs in spirit to a later tradition than the prose,

is treated in a later section. The Apologie for Poetrie was written about 1581, but not published till 1595. The first edition of the Arcadia appeared in 1590, part of the third and a fourth and fifth book being added in the second edition of 1593

Man of Letters and Man of Action. It is impossible to sum up Sidney's character better than is done by his friend and biographer, Fulke Greville, who says:

Indeed he was a true modell of Worth; a man fit for Conquest, Plantation, Reformation, or what Action soever is greatest, and hardest among men: Withall, such a lover of Mankind and Goodnesse, that whatsoever had any reall parts, in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power; like Zephyrus he giving life where he blew.

Prose Writings. The Apologie for Poetrie is the work of a youthful poet, and with the ardour and imagination of youth has many of its shortcomings. Though he was misled by his classical training into denouncing the mixture of comedy with Tragedy, and upholding the strictest observance of the unities, he gives us an extraordinary insight into the creative force and exuberance that made Elizabethan poetry. He expounds the accepted doctrine that all literature of an imaginative or idealistic nature is comprehended under the head of poetry.

For Xenophon, who did imitate so excellently as to give us the portraiture of a just Empire under the name of Cyrus, made therein an absolute heroicall poem. So did Heliodorus in his sugared invention of that picture of love in Theagines and Cariclea. And yet both writ in prose: which I speak to show, that it is not riming and versing that maketh a poet, no more than a longe gowne maketh an Advocate.

Style. It follows that Sidney was at one with Lyly in his theory of artistic prose. But though his style is often as rich as that of Euphues, it is much more conservative in structure, and only in the more elaborate and cloying periods of the Arcadia do we find any close imitation of the euphuistic artifices which he condemned in the Apologie. The classical tradition is obvious in the following:

Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as divers Poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet smelling flowers, nor whatsoever els may make the too much loved earth too lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden. But let those things alone and goe to man, for whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her uttermost cunning is imployed, and knowe whether shee have brought foorth so true a lover as Theagines, so constant a friende as Pilades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a Prince as Xenophons Cyrus, so excellent a man every way as Virgils Aeneas: neither let this be iestingly conceived, because the works of the one be essensiall, the other, in imitation or fiction: for any understanding knoweth the skil of the Artificer standeth in that Idea or fore-conceite of the work, and not in the work it selfe. . . . Neyther let it be deemed too sawcie a comparison to ballance the highest poynt of mans wit with the efficacie of Nature: but rather give right honor to the heavenly Maker of that maker; who having made man to his owne likenes, set him beyond and over all the workes of that second nature: which in nothing hee sheweth so much as in Poetrie; when, with the force of a divine breath, he bringeth things forth far surpassing her dooings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam: sith our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.

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