INTERCALARY CHAPTER.

THE SONNET.

1. As it was Milton who gave to the sonnet a firm place among the forms of English verse, an account of the sonnet and its laws may be rightly introduced here. Its invention has been ascribed to Guido of Arezzo, in 1024. Petrarch (1304-1374) was the poet who first used it largely and developed its many hidden powers to the highest possible degree. As the Italian language, like most other Romance languages, has an average of twenty-four rhymes to each word, while the English language has only three, it is plain that, in a form which requires so many rhymed words, it is much more easy to write in Italian than in English. It has always been a favourite form with the Italian poets.

2. Wyatt and Surrey, who were ardent students of Dante and Petrarch, introduced the form into England. Shakspeare has written one hundred and fifty-four sonnets; but it has been before shown that the only point in which they resemble the Italian sonnet is that they consist of fourteen lines. Milton's sonnets are almost all in strict accordance with the severe Italian model. He wrote only seventeen in all; and Dr. Johnson thought but little of them. "Three of them are not bad," he said; and he accounted to Hannah More, who too docilely took Dr. Johnson's judgment as final, for the amazing badness of the rest, by saying; "Why, madam, Milton's was a genius that could hew a Colossus out of a rock, but could not carve heads on cherry-stones." In later times, the two writers who have contributed most largely, and with the highest excellence, to our comparatively small stock of English sonnets, are Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning. 3. THE SONNET consists of two parts, an octave and a sextant. The octave (or eight lines) is said to consist of two quatrains; and the sextant (or remaining six lines) of two tercets. The subject is supposed to be stated in the first quatrain; is illustrated in the second; is applied in the first tercet; and the whole is summed up or concluded in the second. In the octave there must be only two rhymes; and in the sextant there may be two or three. The rhymes in the two quatrains in the octave should be "extreme and mean" (that is, two outside rhymes and two inside), thus: abba | abba. The rhyme in the sextant may be either a b c | a b c, or a babab, or a ba b c c. The first of these is the most usual.

Put in a tabulated form, the rhymes would appear thus :

4. The following sonnet of Wordsworth's exemplifies these rules :-
Scorn not the Sonnet: Critic, you have frowned

Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakspeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso * sound;
With it Camoëns † soothed an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,

It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faeryland
To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The thing became a trumpet, whence he blew
Soul-animating strains-alas, too few!

Archbishop Trench remarks:-"The necessity of condensation has often compressed and rounded a nebulous vapour into a star. The sonnet, like a Grecian temple, may be limited in its scope, but like that, if successful, it is altogether perfect."

*Tasso-the great Italian poet who wrote the Jerusalem Delivered. The great Portuguese poet-author of The Lusiad.

CHAPTER XIII.

THE CONTEMPORARIES OF MILTON.

HE chief prose writers of Milton's age were, THOMAS HOBBES, IZAAK WALTON, EDWARD HYDE (LORD CLARENDON), RICHARD BAXTER, ABRAHAM COWLEY,* and JOHN BUNYAN. The minor writers of verse were, EDMUND WALLER, HENRY VAUGHAN, RICHARD CRASHAW, SIR JOHN DENHAM, ANDREW MARVELL, and RICHARD LOVELACE. It cannot be said that they influenced Milton's

style of thinking and expression in any way, or that he influenced them; but all of these writers reflect the influences of their own age and of the events of that age, with far more fidelity and vividness than Milton himself, simply because they were more plastic to these influences.

We must deal with each very shortly.

2. THOMAS HOBBES (1588-1679), often called "the philosopher of Malmesbury," because he was born there, spent his life chiefly in writing political and philosophical treatises, "squaring the circle," quarrelling with mathematicians, and acting as tutor to the younger members of the Devonshire family. He lived most of his life at Chatsworth, the seat of the Cavendishes, in Derbyshire. He lived through three generations; and, when young, was intimate with Lord Bacon and Ben Jonson, in middle life he knew Galileo, while in his old age he might have conversed with Locke and with Defoe. He was twenty-eight years of age when Shakspeare died; Addison was seven years old when Hobbes died; and he lived through the reigns of Elizabeth, James, the two Charleses, and the Commonwealth.

*Cowley will also be considered as a poet.

His greatest work is

The Leviathan.

The sub-title is The Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth— Ecclesiastical and Civil. It is an inquiry into the principles on which human society is based. Hobbes holds that force is the foundation of all political and social organisation; and that war is the natural state of man. Sir James Mackintosh praises his style for clearness, and says, it is "the very perfection of didactic language." His chief excellence consists in the care he takes to define his terms. If a writer uses a word or term sometimes in one sense and sometimes in another, sometimes with a larger content or meaning, and sometimes with a smaller, we can never be sure that we understand him rightly. If a shilling were sometimes of the value of ten pence, while at other times it contained thirteen pence, there would be the same confusion in commercial affairs as the want of clear definition of terms produces in philosophy or thought in general. The following passage gives a fair idea of his style :

THE DEFINITION OF TERMS.

Seeing that truth consisteth in the right ordering1 of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth had need to remember what every name he useth stands for, and to place it accordingly, or else he will find himself entangled3 in words as a bird in lime-twigs, the more he struggles, the more belimed. And therefore in geometry, the only science1 that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind, men begin at 5 settling the significations of their words; which settling of significations they call definitions, and place them in the beginning of their reckoning. By this it appears how necessary it is for any man that aspires to true knowledge, to examine the definitions of former 6 authors; and either to correct them where they are negligently set down, or to make them himself. For the errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning7 proceeds, and lead men into absurdities which at last they see, but cannot avoid without reckoning anew from the beginning, in which beginning lies the foundation of their errors. 8 From whence it happens that they which trust to books do as they which cast up many little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little sums were rightly cast up or not; and at last, finding the error visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear themselves, but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of the glass window, for want of wit9 to consider which way they came in. So that in the right definition of names

lies the first use of speech, which is the acquisition of science, and in wrong or no definitions lies the first abuse, from which proceed all false and senseless tenets, which make those men that take their instruction from the authority of books, and not from their own meditation, to be as much below the condition of ignorant men, as men endued with true science are above it. For between true science 10 and erroneous doctrines, ignorance is in the middle. Natural sense and imagination are not subject to absurdity." Nature itself cannot err; and as men abound in copiousness 12 of language, so they become more wise or more mad than ordinary. Nor is it possible without letters 13 for any man to become excellently 14 wise, or unless his memory be hurt by disease or ill constitution of organs, excellently foolish. For words are wise men's counters,-they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, 15 or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.

The

A steady and laborious worker all his life, in his eighty-sixth year he translated the Iliad and Odyssey into English verse. measure he employed was the iambic quatrain (5 x a alternately rhymed) used by Sir John Davies, Dryden, and Gray. His attempt was quite unsuccessful.

The morning now was quite display'd, and Jove,

Upon Olympus' highest top was set;

And all the gods and goddesses above,

By his command, were there together met.

This said, with his black brows to her he nodded,
Wherewith displayed were his locks divine;

Olympus shook at stirring of his godhead,

And Thetis from it jump'd into the brine.

These are not unfair specimens of his powers.

On the other hand, he was not entirely without some poetical sense, Hector's boy, Astyanax, on the bosom of his mother Andromache, is thus described,―

And like a star upon her bosom lay

His beautiful and shining golden head.

On the whole, however, the translation is not Homer, but Hobbes.

3. IZAAK WALTON (1593-1683) is an excellent example of the sweet and kindly nature of the genuine Englishman, of a certain antique