is Drayton's description of it. Exaggerated display of knowledge, excess of allusion, is one of the notes of Lyly's writing, but not the most characteristic. Rather it were just to account it an amiable weakness shared by many of his contemporaries, including Ascham. His 'playing with words,' on the other hand, merits sterner treatment, for such play as his belies, stultifies, and undermines all that is grateful and genuine in human discourse, and substitutes for truth and beauty of expression the soulless rigidity of the Perpendicular Style dominating the architecture of the period. Lyly may be designated a resurgent Athenian rhetorician, in the strictly technical sense of that term-one, that is, who does not aim at the simple and yet adequate projection of an idea, but cramps its presentation, procures its deformity, by fitting it despotically into artificial castiron grooves of pre-existing pattern rather than allowing it to assume becoming corporeal shape through the gentle working of a natural process of germination. His parallel clauses, his transverse alliteration,' his punctilious antithesis are permissible within limits-they are even good as occasional aids and embellishments, but carried to the pitch of pointless and persistent emphasis, they resemble the performances of an acrobat, which illustrate the strained and startling capabilities of the human form, not its proper use or inherent dignity, and the vaulting ambition falls on the other.' A work in which these characteristics are almost uniformly sustained-the chapter on Euphues is a welcome exception-hardly deserves the name of true literature. At the best, it is a curious experiment, not imitable by the wise; at the worst, a blameworthy prostitution of noble powers of language to the itching ears of court gentlemen and court ladies-parrots questing for catch phrases. John CHAPTER IV. HISTORICAL AND EPISTOLARY. THE historians of the age-most of them were mere chroniclers-are incomparably less important than the succession of splendid wits dealt with in the preceding chapter. The earliest of them, John Capgrave, or Brother John, as he loved to style himself, is, if not a distinguished writer, certainly a very interesting person, and if we allow for his limitations as a friar 'compassed murkily about' with mediaeval darkness and prejudice, we cannot rightly withhold an ample measure of respect. Born at Lynn in Norfolk, April 21st, 1394, and educated according to Leland's not unlikely conjecture at Cambridge (though he was a Doctor of Divinity of Oxford), Capgrave was a priest at twenty-four, and entering the house of Austin Friars at Lynn, rose to be its prior, and, in addition, provincial of the order in England. He died August 12th, 1464, at the age of seventy-one. The greater part of Brother John's long life was divided between ecclesiastical duty and laborious literary effort, the principal break being occasioned by a visit to Rome, where he fell sick and was carefully tended by his countryman, William Gray, afterwards Bishop of Ely. His writings, for a friar, are fairly multifarious. He composed commentaries on many of the books of the Bible, beginning with Genesis and ending with the Apocalypse; he published sermons and dogmatic disquisitions; and of biography he was especially prodigal, his lives ranging from those of St. Augustine and his followers to that of Humphry, Duke of Gloucester. Tradition makes him the compiler of a catalogue of English saints, which Wynkyn de Worde was to print under the title of Nova Legenda Angliae. All these works were in Latin, but Capgrave wrote in English a Life of St. Gilbert of Sempringham, the sole copy of which, a manuscript in the Cotton Library, was consumed. in the fire of 1731. In English, too, and in rhyme, is his Life of St. Katherine, which, according to its author, is a refurbishing of an older poem by a West-Country priestone Arreck, of whom strange things are reported. As an historian, Capgrave is known as the producer of two rather important works-The Book of the Noble Henries. and a Chronicle of England. The former, which is in Latin, is composed of three parts, which treat of six Henries who had worn the Imperial crown of Germany, six Henries who had been Kings of England, and twelve Henries, who, though neither kings nor emperors, had succeeded in making themselves famous. The first section, as containing nothing that may not be gleaned from more original sources, is of no special value; the second and third, on the contrary, are replete with interest and instruction—especially the third, which, though not free from errors and marred sometimes by a tendency to eulogize, sometimes by diplomatic silence, is yet a genuine contribution to our knowledge of the times. The Chronicle of England, which is also an English chronicle, would have been materially improved by the omission of the exordium, a conventional summary of universal history, and the addition of chapters recording the events of Capgrave's own lifetime. The retrospect contracts on the accession of Henry III, from which epoch the affairs of the country find a tolerably faithful remembrancer in the Prior of Lynn. In one direction, however, the love of truth and impartiality, which was Capgrave's endowment, succumbs to the suggestions of natural antipathy. A devoted son of the Catholic Church, he was unable to see any good in the Lollards, and the bare mention of Wyclif or Oldcastle suffices to upset his usual calm equilibrium. Capgrave's English style is plain and simple, offering no special points to criticism, but it may be remarked that on occasion the transparency, which is also one of its most constant characteristics, becomes tinged with vivid and varied hues of unconscious transfiguration. John Bourchier, A greater contrast than exists between Brother John and the writer of whom it now falls to us to treat, it is impossible to conceive. From a religious recluse we have abruptly to turn to John Bourchier, a soldier and the son of a soldier, who was born in 1467, at Therfield in Hertfordshire, and having studied-so 'tis said-at Balliol College, Oxford, fought Henry VII's oversea foes and Peter Warbeck's Cornishmen, was present at the capture of Terouenne in 1513, and the same year took the field against the Scots as marshal in the army of the Earl of Surrey. He was chamberlain to the Princess Mary, sister to Henry VIII, on her marriage to Louis XII of France; was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, as which his portrait was painted by Holbein; was colleague of the Archbishop of Armagh in a mission to the court of Madrid in 1518; was at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, with his wife, in 1520, and in the last month of that year was designated Lieutenant of Calais during the king's pleasure, which was continued during the remainder of his favoured subject's life. Berners died on March 16th, 1523. Notwithstanding the important posts he was called upon to fill, he was constantly under water financially, and although Henry VIII helped him with loans and the occasional gift of a manor, nothing served to extricate him from the pecuniary quagmire in which he went on struggling to the day of his final departure. For this he had been, in some measure, prepared by years of infirm health. Translation of Froissart's Berners' literary activity belongs to his period of residence at Calais, his chief work being beyond question his translation of Froissart's Chronicles, which was undertaken at the command of Henry VIII. It is not without reason that this is regarded, even to-day, as the palmary version of the famous French history, since it realizes all that can be desired in a translation. The English is so thoroughly idiomatic that, in reading, one loses all sensation of the book being merely an interpretation and resigns oneself to its easy and familiar flow with the same joyful complacency as if it were a strictly original work. On the other hand, if one insists on breaking the spell by comparing it with the French text, one is struck not only with the felicity, but with the fidelity of the rendering. That it was throughout a labour of love, cannot be doubted, for the translator, as Lieutenant of Calais, was England's watch on the soil of France, where the feats of the Black Prince, depicted by Froissart, and by Berners after him, in brave, imperishable colours, were so gallantly, and, as it were, miraculously performed. Further experiments. The Lieutenant, however, was not satisfied with this one taste of literary glory. He therefore turned into English three French romances in their later prose form-Huon of Bordeaux, Sir Arthur of Little Britain, and the Castle of Love. The first proved the most popular, the primitive edition, which appeared in 1534, being followed by two others, in 1570 |