to write to them on whose foot the black ox had not already trod, as the proverb is, but to those only that are weatherbeaten in the sea of this world, such as having lost the sight of their gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksands.' Thus beside the young unpruned imagination of his friend, quenched before time had stolen from it a particle of its joyousness and luxuriance, he places his own elder and way-worn muse-the poetry of 'Life' beside the poetry of 'Wit.' Such a distinction breathes the spirit of a new world; and in parting Lord Brooke from the writer of Astrophel and Stella places him mentally beside Milton and Bacon.

The

The folio edition of his works, of 1633, the materials for which had been revised and collected for publication by the author, contains three treatises, on 'Human Learning,' on 'Wars,' and 'An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour,' the tragedies of Alaham and Mustapha, and the hundred and ten sonnets of Caelica. Poems of Monarchy and Religion were published later in 1670. Mustapha had also appeared earlier in 1609. To these Mr. Grosart, in a recent complete edition has added a few miscellaneous poems, the lament for Sidney, published in The Phoenix Nest of 1593, two or three poems from England's Helicon, and a doubtful one from The Paradise of Dainty Devices. Of these we are not now concerned with the treatises. They were originally meant to serve as choruses between the acts of Alaham and Mustapha— a whimsical instance of the impracticability of Lord Brooke's genius-and, as we have already said, they are not without lines and passages of poetry. But in the main they are either matter for the biographer, or for the student of seventeenth-century speculation. The collection of shorter poems under the name of Caelica contains a number of love-poems, some perhaps genuine, others mocking and cynical, which, as in Habington's Castara, lead up to a concluding group of religious and philosophical pieces. With sonnets, properly so called, they have nothing more in common than the name. Some of them are undoubtedly echoes of Astrophel and Stella, harsh fantastic echoes which but rarely recall the music of the earlier strain. Sonnet 46, 'Patience, weakfortun'd and weak-minded wit,' is an ‘exercise' on the same theme as Sonnet 56 of Astrophel and Stella. The end of Sonnet 45 is a reminiscence of the tenth song in the same collection, and two better illustrations of poetical failure on the one hand, and such poetical success as the kind of theme admits of on the other,

could scarcely be brought together than the thirteenth sonnet of Caelica, Cupid his boy's play many times forbidden,' as compared with the well-known 'His mother dear Cupid offended late' of Astrophel and Stella. This list might be largely extended with ever-increasing profit to Sidney's reputation. Still, when all deductions are made, Caelica brings its own peculiar reward to the reader. There are veins of poetry in it of a remote and fanciful kind, and what is not poetry will often affect us with the old-world charm, which is the true explanation of Cultismo wherever it appears in literary history, the charm of ingenuity as such, of mind-play pure and simple. To which may be added that among the religious poems of Caelica there is perhaps simpler and sincerer work than Lord Brooke produced anywhere else.

With regard to the poem-plays of Alaham and Mustapha, which may be compared with the much inferior 'Monarchical tragedies' of Sir William Alexander, nothing can be added to the well-known criticism of Charles Lamb, which describes them as 'political treatises, not plays,' in which 'all is made frozen and rigid with intellect,' or to Lord Brooke's own account of them as intended to illustrate the 'high ways of ambitious governours,' and the public and private ruin to which such ways tend. In spite of tragical situations, in spite of the injured youth of Mustapha, and the maiden heroism of Caelica, they are not tragical, and for all their high intellectual ìnterest, they are very seldom poetical. In those rare instances however, where the poet succeeds in mastering and transforming the philosopher, there we have a very noble and perfect effect, such an effect as is reached in The Chorus of Tartars quoted below, where the plea of the world against the claims and promises of religion is put with a passion and directness which lifts it far above its surroundings.

The outer facts of Lord Brooke's prolonged literary career bring the world of Spenser and the world of Milton together in a striking way. He, with Spenser, Dyer, and Sidney, was a member of Harvey's 'Areopagus,' and there is other evidence of intercourse between him and Spenser. His friendship with Sidney is one of the classical stories in the history of English letters. On the other hand Davenant, the founder of the Restoration theatre, was the protégé of his old age, and he died the year before the composition of the Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity.

MARY A. WARD.

CHORUS OF TARTARS.

[From the Tragedy of Mustapha.]

Vast Superstition! Glorious style of weakness!
Sprung from the deep disquiet of man's passion,
To dissolution and despair of Nature:

Thy texts bring princes' titles into question:
Thy prophets set on work the sword of tyrants :
They manacle sweet Truth with their distinctions:
Let Virtue blood: teach Cruelty for God's sake;
Fashioning one God; yet Him of many fashions,
Like many-headed Error, in their passions.
Mankind! Trust not these superstitious dreams,
Fear's idols, Pleasure's relics, Sorrow's pleasures:
They make the wilful hearts their holy temples,
The rebels unto government their martyrs.
No Thou child of false miracles begotten!
False miracles, which are but ignorance of cause,
Lift up the hopes of thy abjected prophets :
Courage and Worth abjure thy painted heavens.
Sickness, thy blessings are; Misery thy trial;
Nothing, thy way unto eternal being;
Death, to salvation; and the grave to heaven.
So blest be they, so angel'd, so eterniz'd
That tie their senses to thy senseless glories,
And die, to cloy the after-age with stories.
Man should make much of Life, as Nature's table,
Wherein she writes the cypher of her glory.
Forsake not Nature, nor misunderstand her:
Her mysteries are read without Faith's eye-sight:
She speaketh in our flesh; and from our senses
Delivers down her wisdoms to our reason.
If any man would break her laws to kill,
Nature doth for defence allow offences.

She neither taught the father to destroy:
Nor promis'd any man, by dying, joy.1

CHORUS OF PRIESTS.

[From Mustapha.]

Oh wearisome condition of Humanity!
Born under one law, to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound:
What meaneth Nature by these diverse laws?
Passion and reason self-division cause.

Is it the mask or majesty of Power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give.
For how should man think that he may not do
If Nature did not fail and punish too?

Tyrant to others, to herself unjust,

Only commands things difficult and hard;
Forbids us all things which it knows we lust;
Makes easy pains, impossible reward.

If Nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
We that are bound by vows and by promotion,
With pomp of holy sacrifice and rites,
To preach belief in God and stir devotion,
To preach of Heaven's wonders and delights,
Yet when each of us in his own heart looks

He finds the God there far unlike his books.

1 These last four lines are in allusion to the plot of Mustapha, which turns upon the murder of the unresisting and innocent Mustapha by his father Solyman, in consequence of certain unjust suspicions.

CHORUS OF GOOD AND EVIL SPIRITS.

[From Alaham.]

Evil Spirits.

Why did you not defend that which was once your own?
Between us two, the odds of worth, by odds of power is known.
Besides map clearly out your infinite extent,

Even in the infancy of Time, when man was innocent1;
Could this world then yield aught to envy or desire,

Where pride of courage made men fall, and baseness rais'd them higher ?

Where they that would be great, to be so must be least,

And where to bear and suffer wrong, was Virtue's native crest.
Man's skin was then his silk; the world's wild fruit his food;
His wisdom, poor simplicity; his trophies inward good.
No majesty for power; nor glories for man's worth ;

Nor any end, but-as the plants-to bring each other forth.
Temples and vessels fit for outward sacrifice,

As they came in, so they go out with that which you call vice.
The priesthood few and poor; no throne but open air;
For that which you call good, allows of nothing that is fair.
No Pyramids rais'd up above the force of thunder,

No Babel-walls by greatness built, for littleness a wonder,
No conquest testifying wit, with [dauntless] courage mixt;

As wheels whereon the world must run, and never can be fixt.
No arts or characters to read the great God in,

Nor stories of acts done; for these all entered with the sin.
A lazy calm, wherein each fool a pilot is!

The glory of the skilful shines, where men may go amiss.
Till we came in there was no trial of your might,
And since we were in men, yourselves presume of little right.
Then cease to blast the Earth with your abstracted dreams,
And strive no more to carry men against Affection's streams.

Keep therefore where you are; descend not but ascend :

For, underneath the sun, be sure no brave state is your friend.

1 i. e. 'consider the boundless power you enjoyed in the golden age.'