thing which disgraced the reigns of Charles | mock-Puritan ballad which Sir Christopher II. or his brother.

Are we to gather from this fact that Cartwright was not really an original genius, but only a magnificent imitator? that he could write plays well because others had written them well already, but only for that reason; and that for the same reason, when he attempted detached lyrics and addresses, he could only follow the abominable models which he saw around him? We know not: for surely in Jonson and Shakspeare's minor poems he might have found simpler and sweeter types; and even in those of Fletcher, who appears, from his own account, to have been his especial pattern; Shakspeare, however, as we have seen, he looked down on, as did the rest of his generation.

sings in The Ordinary, just after an epithalamium so graceful and melodious, though a little "warm" in tone, as to really be out of place in such a fellow's mouth,) passes current against men, who were abroad the founders of the United States, and the forefathers of the acutest and most enterprising nation on earth, and who at home proved themselves, by terrible fact, not only the physically stronger party, but the more cunning. But so it was fated to be. A deep mist of conceit, fed by the shallow breath of parasites, players, and pedants, wrapt that unhappy Court in blind security, till "the breaking was as the swelling out of a high wall, which cometh suddenly in an instant."

"But after all, what Poetry and Art there was in that day, good or bad, all belonged to the royalists."

Cartwright, as an Oxford scholar, is of course a worshipper of Charles, and a hater of Puritans. We do not wish to raise a prejudice against so young a man, by quoting any of the ridiculous, and often somewhat abject, All? There are those who think that, if rant with which he addresses their majesties mere concettism be a part of poetry, Quarles on their return from Scotland, on the queen's is a ten times greater poet than Cowley or delivery, on the birth of the Duke of York, George Herbert, and equal, perhaps, to and so forth-for in that he did but copy Vaughan and Withers. On this question, the tone of grave divines and pious prelates; and on the real worth of the seventeenth but he, unfortunately for his fame, is given century lyrists, something may be said here(as young geniuses are sometimes) to pro- after in this Review. Meanwhile, there are phesy; and two of his prophecies, at least those, too, who believe John Bunyan, conhave hardly been fulfilled. He was some- sidered simply as an artist, to be the greatwhat mistaken, when, on the birth of the est dramatic author whom England has seen Duke of York, he informed the world that since Shakspeare; and there linger, too, in the libraries and the ears of men, words of "The state is now past fear; and all that we Need wish besides is perpetuity." one John Milton. He was no rigid hater of the beautiful, merely because it was heathen and popish; no more, indeed, were many highly-educated and highly-born gentlemen of the Long Parliament; no more was Cromwell himself, whose delight was (if we may trust that double renegade Waller,) to talk over with him the worthies of Rome and Greece, and who is said (and we believe truly) to have preserved for the nation Raphael's cartoons, and Andrea Mantegna's triumph, when Charles' pictures were sold. But Milton had steeped his whole soul in romance. He had felt the beauty and glory of the chivalrous middle age as deeply as Shakspeare himself; he had as much classical lore as any Oxford pedant. He felt to his heart's core, (for he sang of it, and had he not felt it he would only have written of it,) the magnificence and worth of really high art, of the drama when it was worthy of man and of itself.

And, after indulging in various explanations of the reason why "Nature" showed no prodigies at the birth of the future patron of Judge Jeffreys, which, if he did not believe them, are lies, and if he did, are very like blasphemies, declares that the infant is

"A son of Mirth, Of Peace and Friendship; 'tis a quiet birth."

Nor, again, if spirits in the other world have knowledge of human affairs, can we be now altogether satisfied with his augury as to the capacities of the New England Puri

tans,

"They are good silly people; souls that will
Be cheated without trouble: one eye is
Put out with zeal, th' other with ignorance,
And yet they think they're eagles.'

Whatsoever were the faults of Cotton Ma-
ther's band of pioneers, and they were
many, silliness was certainly not among
them. But such was the Court fashion.
Any insult, however shallow, ribald, and
doggrel, (and all these terms are just of the

"Of gorgeous tragedy,

Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line,
Or the tale of Troy divine,
And what, though rare, of later age,
Ennobled hath the later stage."

No poet, perhaps, shows wider and truer only lasting poet of that generation was a sympathy with every form of the really Puritan; one who, if he did not write beautiful in art, and nature, and history; dramas in sport, at least acted dramas in and yet he was a Puritan. earnest. For drama means, etymologically,

Yes, Milton was a Puritan; one, who in- action and doing; and of the drama there stead of trusting himself, and his hopes of are, and always will be, two kinds: one the the universe, to secondhand hearsays, sys-representative, the other the actual; and tems, and traditions, had looked God's Word for a world wherein there is no superabunand his own soul in the face, and determined dance of good deeds, the latter will be alto act on that which he had found. And ways the better kind. It is good to repretherefore it is, that to open his works at any sent heroical action in verse, and on the stray page, after these effeminate Carolists, stage: it is good to "purify," as old Arisis like falling asleep in a stifling city draw- totle has it, "the affections by pity and tering-room, amid Rococo French furniture, ror." There is an ideal tragedy, and an not without untidy traces of last night's ideal comedy also, which one can imagine as ball, and awaking in an alpine valley, amid an integral part of the highest Christian the scent of sweet cyclamens and pine civilisation. But when "Christian" tragedy boughs, to the music of trickling rivulets sinks below the standard of heathen Greek and shouting hunters, and to see above your tragedy; when, instead of setting forth head the dark cathedral aisles of mighty heroical deeds, it teaches the audience new pines, and here and there, above them and beyond, the spotless peaks of everlasting snow; while far beneath your feet

"The hemisphere of earth, in clearest ken, Stretched to the amplest reach of prospect, lies."

Take any,-the most hackneyed passage of Comus, the Allegro, the Penseroso, the Paradise Lost, and see the freshness, the sweetness, and the simplicity, which is strangely combined with the pomp, the self-restraint, the earnestness of every word; take him even, as an experimentum crucis, when he trenches upon ground heathen and questionable, and tries the court poets at their own weapons,

"Or whether, (as some sages sing,)

possibilities of crime, and new excuses for those crimes; when, instead of purifying the affections by pity and terror, it confounds the moral sense by exciting pity and terror merely for the sake of excitement, careless whether they be well or ill directed, then it is of the devil, and the sooner it returns to its father, the better for mankind. When, again, comedy, instead of stirring a divine scorn of baseness, or even a kindly and indulgent smile at the weaknesses and oddities of humanity, learns to make a mock of sin,-— to find excuses for the popular frailties which it pretends to expose, then it also is of the devil, and to the devil let it go; while honest and earnest men, who have no such exceeding love of "Art," that they must needs have bad art rather than none at all, do the duty which lies nearest them, amid clean whitewash and honest prose. The whole theory of "Art, its dignity, and vocation," seems to us at times questionable, if coarse facts are to be allowed to weigh, (as we sup pose they are,) against delicate theories. If but why quote what all the world knows?- we are to judge by the examples of Italy, Where shall we find such real mirth, ease, the country which has been most of all desweetness, dance and song of words in any-voted to the practice of " Art," and by that thing written for five-and-twenty years before him? True, he was no great dramatist. He never tried to be one: but there was no one in his generation who could have written either Comus or Samson Agonistes. And if, as is commonly believed, and as his countenance seems to indicate, he was deficient in humour, so were his contemporaries, with the sole exception of Cartwright. Witty he could be, and bitter: but he did not live in a really humorous age; and if he has none of the rollicking fun of the foxhound puppy, at least he has none of the obscene gibber of the ape.

The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr with Aurora playing,
As he met her once a-maying,
There on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses washed in dew".

After all, the great fact stands, that the
D-3

VOL. XXV.

of Germany, the country which has raised the study of Art into a science, then a nation is not necessarily free, strong, moral, or happy, because it can "represent" facts, or can understand how other people have represented them. We do not hesitate to go farther, and to say, that the present imbecility of Germany is to be traced in a great degree to that pernicious habit of mind. which makes her educated men fancy it enough to represent noble thoughts and feelings, or to analyze the representations of them: while they do not bestir themselves, or dream that there is the least moral need for bestirring themselves, toward putting

these thoughts and feelings into practice. are exactly of the same opinion. They held Goethe herein is indeed the typical German: that lace, perfumes, and jewellery on a man God grant that no generation may ever see were marks of unmanly foppishness and such a typical Englishman; and that our vanity; and so hold the finest gentlemen in race, remembering ever that the golden age England now. They thought it equally abof the English drama was one of private surd and sinful for a man to carry his inimmorality, public hypocrisy, ecclesiastical come on his back, and bedizen himself out pedantry, and regal tyranny, and ended in in reds, blues, and greens, ribbons, knots, the temporary downfal of Church and slashes, and "treble quadruple dædalian Crown, may be more ready to do fine ruffs, built up on iron and timber, (a fact,) things, than to write fine books; and act in which have more arches in them for pride their lives, as those old Puritans did, a than London Bridge for use." We, if we drama which their descendants may be glad met such a ruffed and ruffled worthy as used to put on paper for them, long after they to swagger by hundreds up and down Paul's are dead. Walk, not knowing how to get a dinner, For surely these Puritans were dramatic much less to pay his tailor, should look on enough, poetic enough, picturesque enough. him as firstly a fool, and secondly a swinWe do not speak of such fanatics as Balfour dler; while, if we met an old Puritan, we of Burley, or any other extravagant person should consider him a man gracefully and whom it may have suited Walter Scott to picturesquely drest, but withal in the most take as a typical personage. We speak of perfect sobriety of good taste; and when the average Puritan nobleman, gentleman, we discovered, (as we probably should,) merchant, or farmer, and hold him to have over and above, that the harlequin cavalier been a picturesque and poetical man,—a had a box of salve and a pair of dice in one man of higher imagination and deeper feeling than the average of Court poets, and a man of sound taste also. What is to be said for his opinions about the stage, has been seen already; but it seems to have escaped most persons' notice, that either all England is grown very foolish, or the Puritan opinions on several matters have been justified by time.

pocket, a pack of cards and a few pawnbrokers' duplicates in the other; that his thoughts were altogether of citizens' wives, and their too easy virtue; and that he could not open his mouth without a dozen oaths, we should consider the Puritan, (even though he did quote Scripture somewhat through his nose,) as the gentleman; and the courtier as a most offensive specimen of On the matter of the stage, the world has the "snob triumphant," glorying in his certainly come over to their way of think- shame. The picture is not ours, nor even ing. Few educated men now think it worth the Puritan's. It is Bishop Hall's, Bishop while to go to see any play, and that exactly Earle's,-it is Beaumont's, Fletcher's, Jonfor the same reasons as the Puritans put son's, Shakspeare's, the picture which forward; and still fewer educated men every dramatist, as well as satirist, has think it worth while to write plays: finding drawn of the "gallant" of the seventeenth that since the grosser excitements of the imagination have become forbidden themes, there is really very little to write about.

But in the matter of dress and of manners, the Puritan triumph has been complete. Even their worst enemies have come over to their side, and "the whirligig of time has brought about its revenge."

century. No one can read those writers honestly without seeing that the Puritan, and not the Cavalier conception of what a British gentleman should be, is the one accepted by the whole nation at this day.

In applying the same canon to the dress of women, they were wrong. As in other matters, they had hold of one pole of a Their canons of taste have become those double truth, and erred in applying it exof all England, and High Churchmen, who clusively to all cases. But there are two still call them round-heads and cropped things to be said for them; first, that the ears, go about rounder-headed and closer dress of that day was palpably an incentive cropt than they ever went. They held it to the profligacy of that day, and therefore more rational to cut the hair to a comforta- had to be protested against; in these more ble length than to wear effeminate curls moral times, ornaments and fashions may down the back. And we cut ours much be harmlessly used, which then could not be shorter than they ever did. They held, used without harm. And next, it is unde(with the Spaniards, then the finest gentle- niable that sober dressing is more and more men in the world,) that sad, i. e., dark becoming the fashion among well-bred colours, above all black, were the fittest for men, and that among them, too, the Puritan stately and earnest gentlemen. We all, canons are gaining ground. from the Tractarian to the Anythingarian,

WO

We have just said that the Puritans held

too exclusively to one pole of a double row men enough among them; so there truth. They did so, no doubt, in their were in the opposite party. No Puritan hatred of the drama. Their belief that could have had less poetry in him, less taste, human relations were, if not exactly sinful, less feeling, than Laud himself. But is at least altogether carnal and unspiritual, there no poetry save words? no drama save prevented their conceiving the possibility of that which is presented on the stage? Is this any truly Christian drama, and led them at glorious earth, and the souls of living men, times into strange and sad errors, like that mere prose, as long as "carent vate sacro,' New England ukase of Cotton Mather's, who will, forsooth, do them the honour to who punished the woman who should kiss make poetry out of a little of them, (and of her infant on the Sabbath day. Yet their how little !) by translating them into words, extravagancies on this point were but the which he himself, just in proportion as he honest revulsion from other extravagancies is a good poet, will confess to be clumsy, on the opposite side. If the undistinguish- tawdry, ineffectual? Was there no poetry ing and immoral Autotheism of the play- in these Puritans, because they wrote no wrights, and the luxury and heathendom of poetry? We do not mean now the unwritten the higher classes, first in Italy and then in tragedy of the battle-psalm and the charge; England, were the natural revolt of the hu- but simple idyllic poetry and quiet homeman mind against the Manichæism of Popish drama, love-poetry of the heart and the monkery, then the severity and exclusive- hearth, and the beauties of every-day hu ness of Puritanism was a natural and neces- man life? Take the most commonplace sary revolt against that luxury and immo- of them: was Zeal-for-Truth Thoresby, of rality; a protest for man's God-given su- Thoresby Rise in Deeping Fen, because his periority over nature, against that Natural- father had thought fit to give him an ugly ism which threatened to end in sheer bru- and silly name, the less of a noble lad? tality. While Italian prelates have found Did his name prevent his being six feet an apologist in Mr. Roscoe, and English high? Were his shoulders the less broad play-wrights in Mr. Gifford, the old Puri- for it, his cheek the less ruddy for it? He tans, who felt and asserted, however extrav- wore his flaxen hair of the same length that agantly, that there was an eternal law, every one now wears theirs, instead of letwhich was above all Borgias, and Machia- ting it hang half-way to his waist in essenced vels, Stuarts, and Fletchers, have surely a curls; but was he therefore the less of a right to a fair trial. If they went too far true Viking's son, bold-hearted as his seain their contempt for humanity, certainly no roving ancestors, who won the Danelagh one interfered to set them right. The An- by Canute's side, and settled there on glicans of that time, who held intrinsically Thoresby Rise, to grow wheat and breed the same anthropologic notions, and yet horses, generation succeeding generation, in wanted the courage and sincerity to carry the old moated grange? He carried a them out as honestly, neither could nor Bible in his jack-boots; but did that prewould throw any light upon the contro- vent him, as Oliver rode past him with an versy; and the only class who sided with approving smile on Naseby field, thinking the poor play-wrights in asserting that there himself a very handsome fellow, with his were more things in man, and more excuses mustache and imperial, and bright-red coat, for man, than were dreamt of in Prynne's and cuirass well polished, in spite of many philosophy, were the Jesuit Casuists, who, a dint, as he sate his father's great black by a fatal perverseness, used all their little horse as gracefully and firmly as any long. knowledge of human nature to the same locked and essenced cavalier in front of undesirable purpose as the play-wrights; him? Or did it prevent him thinking too, namely, to prove how it was possible to for a moment, with a throb of the heart, commit every conceivable sinful action that sweet Cousin Patience far away at without sinning. No wonder that in an home, could she but see him, might have age in which courtiers and theatre haunters the same opinion of him as he had of himwere turning Romanists by the dozen, and self? Was he the worse for the thought? the priest-ridden Queen was the chief pa- He was certainly not the worse for checking troness of the theatre, the Puritans should it the next instant, with manly shame for have classed players and Jesuits in the same letting such "carnal vanities" rise in his category, and deduced the parentage of both heart, while he was "doing the Lord's alike from the father of lies.

But as for these Puritans having been merely the sour, narrow, inhuman persons they are vulgarly supposed to have been, credat Judæus. There were sour and nar

work" in the teeth of death and hell: but was there no poetry in him then? No poetry in him, five minutes after, as the long rapier swung round his head, redder and redder at every sweep? We are be

fooled by names. Call him Crusader in-ere they sank into rest, seem to him as stead of Roundhead, and he seems at once God's bells chiming him home in triumph, (granting him only sincerity, which he had, with peals sweeter and bolder than those and that of a right awful kind) as complete of Lincoln or Peterborough steeple-house? a knight-errant as ever watched and prayed, Did not the very lapwing, as she tumbled, ere putting on his spurs, in fantastic Gothic softly wailing, before his path, as she did chapel, beneath "storied windows richly years ago, seem to welcome the wanderer dight.' Was there no poetry in him, home in the name of heaven? either, half an hour afterwards, as he lay bleeding across the corpse of the gallant horse, waiting for his turn with the surgeon, and fumbled for the Bible in his boot, and tried to hum a psalm, and thought of Cousin Patience, and his father, and his mother, and how they would hear, at least, that he had played the man in Israel that day, and resisted unto blood, striving against sin and the Man of Sin?

Fair Patience, too, though she was a Puritan, yet did not her cheek flush, her eye grow dim, like any other girl's, as she saw far off the red-coat, like a sliding spark of fire, coming slowly along the strait fen-bank, and fled up stairs into her chamber to pray, half that it might be, half that it might not be, he? Was there no happy storm of human tears and human laughter when he entered the court-yard gate? Did not the old And was there no poetry in him, too, as dog lick his Puritan hand as lovingly as if it he came wearied along Thoresby dyke, in had been a Cavalier's? Did not lads and the quiet autumn eve, home to the house of lasses run out shouting? Did not the old his forefathers, and saw afar off the knot of yeoman father hug him, weep over him, tall poplars rising over the broad misty hold him at arm's length, and hug him again, flat, and the one great abele tossing its as heartily as any other John Bull, even sheets of silver in the dying gusts, and though the next moment he called all to knew that they stood before his father's kneel down and thank Him who had sent door? Who can tell all the pretty child- his boy home again, after bestowing on him memories which flitted across his brain at the grace to bind kings in chains and nobles that sight, and made him forget that he was with links of iron, and contend to death for a wounded cripple? There is the dyke the faith delivered to the saints? And did where he and his brothers snared the great not Zeal-for-Truth look about as wistfully pike which stole the ducklings-how many for Patience as any other man would have years ago? while pretty little Patience done, longing to see her, yet not daring stood by trembling, and shrieked at each even to ask for her? And when she came snap of the brute's wide jaws; and there- down at last, was she the less lovely in his down that long dark lode, ruffling with eyes, because she came, not flaunting with crimson in the sunset breeze, he and his bare bosom, in tawdry finery and paint, but brother skated home in triumph with Pa- shrouded close in coif and pinner, hiding tience when his uncle died. What a day from all the world beauty which was there that was! when, in the clear, bright winter still, but was meant for one alone, and that noon, they laid the gate upon the ice, and only if God willed, in God's good time? tied the beef-bones under the four corners, And was there no faltering of their voices, and packed little Patience on it. How no light in their eyes, no trembling pressure pretty she looked, though her eyes were red of their hands, which said more, and was with weeping, as she peeped out from more, ay, and more beautiful in the sight of among the heap of blankets and horse- Him who made them, than all Herrick's hides, and how merrily their long fen-run- Dianemes, Waller's Sacharissas, flames, ners whistled along the ice-lane, between darts, posies, love-knots, anagrams, and the the high banks of sighing reed, as they towed rest of the insincere cant of the court? What home their new treasure in triumph, at a if Zeal-for-Truth had never strung two pace like the race horse's, to the dear old rhymes together in his life? Did not his home among the poplar-trees. And now he heart go for inspiration to a loftier Helicon, was going home to meet her, after a mighty when it whispered to itself, "My love, my victory, a deliverance from heaven, second dove, my undefiled is but one," than if he only in his eyes to that Red-Sea one. Was had filled pages with sonnets, about Venuses, there no poetry in his heart at that thought? and Cupids, love sick shepherds and cruel Did not the glowing sunset, and the reed- nymphs? beds which it transfigured before him into sheets of golden flame, seem tokens that the glory of God was going before him in his path? Did not the sweet clamour of the wild-fowl, gathering for one rich pean

And was there no poetry, true idyllic poetry, as of Longfellow's Evangeline itself, in that trip round the old farm next morning; when Zeal-for-Truth, after looking over every heifer, and peeping into every stye,