LIVES OF SACRED POETS.

INTRODUCTION.

could see so clearly in The introduction of the epoch in our poetical

THE pleasant study of English Poetry begins with the ornate wryting" of Chaucer; and Sir Philip Sidney might well marvel that he that " grey and misty time." Heroic measure forms an history*. But it was in Chaucer's green old age, as Mr. T. Campbell has observed, that he put forth the full and ripe power of his genius in the Canterbury Tales. The feelings, the thoughts, and the manners of the fourteenth century, live in his verse. Who, after reading the Tales, does not sleep with the poet in "Southwerk, at the Tabard," and "be erly for to rise" with the thirty pilgrims in the morning? But it should never be forgotten, in speaking of Chaucer, that he was among the first to resort to that precious fountain which his contemporary Wickliffe had opened, and that he drank of the "water springing up to everlasting life."

From the death of Chaucer to the reign of Henry the Eighth, the nation made little progress in intellectual improvement; the morning-stars of our poetry went down in darkness, and the historian surveys a long and dreary period of war and wretchedness. Henry ascended

See the Essay upon the Versification of Chaucer prefixed to the Edition of his works by Tyrwhit, vol. i.

B

the throne at a most auspicious season; and even the evils attending his father's policy may be said to have ultimately promoted the good of the country. The rapid advances of "fine literature *," at a time when the kingdom rang with religious controversy, is indeed astonishing. The chivalrous character of the youthful Monarch, and the magnificence with which he invested the government, must have been powerful instruments in awakening the imagination. He was, moreover, well versed in the scholastic learning of the age, with which his mind had been imbued in childhood; his praise was the theme of his noblest and most accomplished contemporaries. Erasmus beheld in him the parent of the golden age, and the amiable Melancthon delighted to compare him to the most illustrious of the Ptolemies, when the glory of Athens had passed into Alexandria, and kings rejoiced in the companionship of poets and philosophers. In the later years of his life, the mind of Henry underwent a melancholy change; but that the love of goodness and of learning never entirely forsook him, the professorships he founded at Oxford and Cambridge, in 1540, for Greek, Hebrew, civil law, divinity, and medicine, abundantly testify t.

The Reformation, while it introduced a fresh principle in the habits and feelings of the people, especially affected the structure of our poetry. The unsealed Book was studied with enthusiasm and religious delight. The brief and troubled reign of Edward the Sixth abounded with metrical translations of various parts of

*Southey's Specimens of the later English Poets, vol. i.

+ It is scarcely necessary to refer the reader to Turner's History of the Reign of Henry the Eighth, and Dr. Nott's elaborate edition of the Earl of Surrey's Poems, for an ingenious and interesting account of the literature of this era.

STERNHOLD AND HOPKINS.

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the Scriptures. The principal of these, and the only one to which I shall refer, is the well-known version of the Psalms by STERNHOLD and HOPKINS.

The metrical Psalmody of John Huss and Martin Luther, in Germany, had been followed by the translation of Clement Marôt, in France. It was undertaken at the request, and made from the version, of the celebrated Vatable, professor of Hebrew in the University of Paris, one of the most learned men of the age, and the restorer of the study of Hebrew in France. The favourite of Francis the First and his Court, Marôt's Sainctes Chansonettes, became universally popular, and were sung by the Monarch and his peers. Their publication was, however, attended with much inconvenience, and some danger to the poet. The Sorbonne discovered errors in the translation, and complained of them to the King; but Francis, who admired the poet, paid little attention to their remonstrances, and Marot, in some verses, alludes to the offending the Sorbonne as the natural result of pleasing the King. The sale of the work was, however, forbidden, and he subsequently found it necessary to retreat to Geneva*.

The infectious phrensy of sacred song, says Warton, soon reached England, at the very critical point of time when it had just embraced the Reformation. Wyatt and Surrey had, before this period, translated various psalms into verse, but the version of Sternhold was the first introduced into the Church of England. Sternhold, who had received a collegiate education, was groom of the robes to Henry the Eighth; a situation which, we are told by Braithwait, he obtained by his poetical

To the edition of Marôt's Psalms published at Geneva in 1543, Calvin prefixed a Preface. See Dunster's Considerations on Psalmody,

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STERNHOLD AND HOPKINS.

talents*. He retained his office in the court of Edward the Sixth.

:

Warton has pointed out a "coincidence of circumstances" between Sternhold and Marôt. They were, indeed, both laymen and court poets, and Sternhold dedicated his translation to Edward, as Marôt had done to Francis I think the parallel extends no further. Sternhold, of a serious, ardent, and upright mind, seems to have been entirely destitute of literary talent and poetical feeling; Marôt, on the contrary, the idol of a romantic Court, negligent and luxurious in his life, was endowed with a grace of style, a sportiveness of fancy, and a pathos of sentiment, not often in later times so harmoniously blended. With him, in fact, the history of real French poetry commences; even his antiquity is only external. Il n'y a guère, observes La Bruyère, entre Marót et nous que la différence de quelques mots. Sternhold, I believe, departed from life as he had lived, in prosperity and comfort; Marôt in poverty and destitution.

Of Sternhold's fellow-labourer Hopkins, nothing more than the profession has been ascertained; he was a clergyman and schoolmaster in Suffolk, and Warton considers him a rather better poet than Sternhold. Among the other contributors to the collective version, we may notice William Whyttingham, the friend of Calvin and Knox, and an inferior versifier even to the preceding t. Thomas Norton, more favourably known as the assistant of Lord Buckhurst in the drama of

*English Gentleman, p. 191. 1630.

+ William Kethe (W. K.) was also a considerable contributor; M. Haslewood (Censura Lit. v. 10), assigns twenty-five Psalms to his pen. Soon after the accession of Mary, Kethe fled to Geneva. The names of William Kethe and his wife" occur in the Livre des Anglois à Genève, November 5, 1556.

Gorboduc; Robert Wisdome, whose fears of the Pope and the Turk were ridiculed by the "witty, generous, and eloquent" Bishop Corbet; and T. C., supposed to be Thomas Churchyard, a most indefatigable writer of "sad and heavy verses *."

Sternhold died in 1549, and the fifty-one psalms versified by him were printed in the same year; the complete version was published in 1562.

After the death of the Earl of Surrey, the only work of genius produced before Spenser, was LORD BUCKHURST'S Induction to the Mirrour for Magistrates; the conception of his youthful mind, but abounding in the rugged grandeur and sublimity of Dante.

Under the gloomy tyranny of Mary, poetry obtained little attention; but, though discouraged, it was not destroyed t. The River of Gold was only hidden for a season, that it might flow forth in a more majestic torrent in the happier reign of her successor.

To SPENSER must be assigned the glory of having delivered the Muse from the lethargy that had so long oppressed her. The appearance of the Faery Queen must

*Churchyard entitled his tribute to the memory of Whitgift, Sad and Heavy Verses for the Losse of Archbishop Whitgift. The supposition that the initials T. C. belong to Churchyard is rendered still more probable by his extended age. Mr. Chalmers, in his Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare MSS., observes, p. 65, (n) 2, that he discovered from the Parish Register of St. Margaret's, Westminster, that Churchyard's burial took place the 4th of April, 1604.

+ The Paradise of Dainty Devises may be considered as belonging rather to the reign of Mary than Elizabeth. The first edition appeared in 1576. The terror of Mary's Government, as Sir Egerton Brydges has observed, tended to produce a moral severity, for which some of the poems in this collection are remarkable. One of the ablest contributors is Lord Vaux; in the first edition thirteen poems are attributed to his pen. In some we remark a plaintive tenderness, and in others a grand austerity of tone sometimes approaching to sublimity, as in the lines on the Instabilitie of Youth. That Lord Vaux possessed a vein of fancy, is proved by the Assault of Cupid, which has been inserted in Bishop Percy's Reliques of Poetry. He seems to have passed a virtuous and tranquil life, and to have died about the year 1555.