JARTON, with great beauty and justice, compares the appearance of Chaucer in our returns, and the buds and blossoms, which have been called forth by a transient sunshine, are nipped by frosts and scattered by storms. The causes of the relapse of our poetry, after Chaucer, seem but too apparent in the annals of English history, which during five reigns of the fifteenth century continue to display but a tissue of conspiracies, proscriptions, and bloodshed. Inferior even to France in literary progress, England displays in the fifteenth century a still more mortifying contrast with Italy. Italy, too, had her religious schisms and public distractions; but her arts and literature had always a sheltering-place. They were even cherished by the rivalship of independent communities, and received encouragement from the opposite sources of commercial and ecclesiastical wealth. But we had no Nicholas the Fifth, nor house of Medicis. In England, the evils of civil war agitated society as one mass. There was no refuge from them-no inclosure to fence in the field of improvement-no mound to stem the torrent of public troubles. Before the death of Henry VI., it is said that one half of the nobility and gentry in the kingdom had perished in the field, or on the scaffold. Whilst in England the public spirit was thus brutalized, whilst the value and security of life were abridged, whilst the wealth of the rich was employed only in war, and the chance of patronage taken from the scholar; in Italy, princes and magistrates vied with each other in calling men of genius around them, as the brightest ornaments of their states and courts. The art of printing came to Italy to record the treasures of its literary attainments; but when it came to England, with a very few exceptions, it could not be said, for the purpose of diffusing native literature, to be a necessary art. A circumstance, additionally hostile to the national genius, may certainly be traced in the executions for religion, which sprang up as a horrible novelty in our country in the fifteenth century. The clergy were determined to indemnify themselves for the exposures which they had met with in the preceding age, and the unhallowed compromise which Henry IV. made with them, in return for supporting his accession, armed them, in an evil hour, with the torch of persecution. In one point of improvement, namely, in the boldness of religious inquiry, the North of Europe might already boast of being superior to the South, with all its learning, wealth, and elegant acquirements. The Scriptures had been opened by Wickliffe, but they were again to become "a fountain sealed, and a spring shut up." Amidst the progress of letters in Italy, the fine arts threw enchantment around superstition; and the warm imagination of the South was congenial to the nature of Catholic institutions. But the English mind had already shown, even amidst its comparative barbarism, a stern independent spirit of religion; and from this single proud and elevated point of its character, it was now to be crushed and beaten down. Sometimes a baffled struggle against oppression is more depressing to the human faculties than continued submission.

Our natural hatred of tyranny, and we may safely add, the general test of history and experience, would dispose us to believe religious persecution to be necessarily and essentially baneful to the elegant arts, no less than to the intellectual pursuits of mankind. It is natural to think, that when punishments are let loose upon men's opinions, they will spread a contagious alarm from the understanding to the imagination. They will make the heart grow close and insensible to generous feelings, where it is unaccustomed to express them freely; and the graces and gaiety of fancy will be dejected and appalled. In an age of persecution, even the living study of his own species must be comparatively darkened to the poet. He looks round on the characters and countenances of his fellow-creatures; and instead of the naturally cheerful and eccentric variety of their humours, he reads only a sullen and oppressed uniformity. To the spirit of poetry we should conceive such a period to be an impassable Avernus, where she would drop her wings and expire. Undoubtedly this inference will be

found warranted by a general survey of the history of Genius. It is, at the same time, impossible to deny, that wit and, poetry have in some instances flourished coeval with ferocious bigotry, on the same spot, and under the same government. The literary glory of Spain was posterior to the establishment of the Inquisition. neighbourhood, though he declared that he could have made his writings still more enterThe fancy of Cervantes sported in its taining if he had not dreaded the Holy Office. But the growth of Spanish genius, in spite of the co-existence of religious tyranny, was fostered by uncommon and glorious advantages in the circumstances of the nation. Spain (for we are comparing Spain in the sixteenth with England in the fifteenth century) was, at the period alluded to, great and proud in an empire on which it was boasted that the sun never set. wealth of America for a while animated all her arts. Robertson says that the Spaniards disHer language was widely diffused. The covered at that time an extent of political knowledge which the English themselves did not attain for more than a century afterwards. Religious persecutions began in England at a time when she was comparatively poor and barbarous, yet after she had been awakened to so much intelligence on the subject of religion as to make one half of the people indignantly impatient of priestly tyranny. If we add to the political troubles of the age, the circumstances of religious opinions being silenced and stifled by penal horrors, it will seem more wonderful that the spark of literature was kept alive, than that it did not spread more widely. Yet the fifteenth century had its redeeming traits of refinement, the more wonderful for appearing in the midst of such unfavourable circumstances. It had a Fortescue, although he wandered in exile, unprotected by the constitution which he explained and extolled in his writings. It had a noble patron and lover of letters in Tiptoft, although he died by the hands of the executioner. It witnessed the founding of many colleges in both of the universities, although they were still the haunts of scholastic quibbling; and it produced, in the venerable Pecock, one conscientious dignitary of the church, who wished to have converted the Protestants by appeals to reason, though for so doing he had his books, and, if he had not recanted in good time, would have had his body also, committed to the flames. To these causes may be ascribed the backwardness of our poetry between the dates of Chaucer and Spenser. I speak of the chasm extending to, or nearly to, Spenser; for, without undervaluing the elegant talents of Lord Surrey, I think we cannot consider the national genius as completely emancipated from oppressive circumstances, till the time of Elizabeth. There was indeed a commencement of our poetry under Henry VIII. It was a fine, but a feeble one. English genius seems then to have come forth, but half assured that her day of emancipation was at hand. There is something melancholy even in Lord Surrey's strains of gallantry. The succession of Henry VIII. gave stability to the government, and some degree of magnificence to the state of society. But tyranny was not yet at an end; and to judge, not by the gross buffoons, but by the few minds entitled to be called poetical, which appear in the earlier part of the sixteenth century, we may say that the English Muse had still a diffident aspect and a faltering tone.

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The Scottish poets of the fifteenth, and of a part of the sixteenth century, would also justly demand a place in any history of our poetry that meant to be copious and minute; as the northern 66 makers," notwithstanding the difference of dialect, generally denominate their language "Inglis." Scotland produced an entire poetical version of the Eneid, before Lord Surrey had translated a single book of it; indeed, before there was an English version of any classic, excepting Boëthius, if he can be called a classic. English language through a romance of the Siege of Troy, published by Caxton, which, as Virgil was only known in the Bishop Douglas observes, in the prologue to his Scottish Eneid, is no more like Virgil than the devil is like St. Austin. Perhaps the resemblance may not even be so great. But the Scottish poets, after all that has been said of them, form nothing like a brilliant revival of poetry. They are on the whole superior, indeed, in spirit and originality to their English contemporaries, which is not saying much; but their style is, for the most part, cast, if possible, in a worst taste. The prevailing fault of English diction, in the fifteenth century, is redundant ornament, and an affectation of Anglicising Latin words. In this pedantry and use of "aureate terms," the Scottish versifiers went even beyond their brethren of the south. Some exceptions to the remark, I am aware, may be found in Dunbar, who sometimes exhibits simplicity and lyrical terseness; but even his style has frequent deformities of quaintness, false ornament, and alliteration. The rest of them, when they meant to be most eloquent, tore up words from the Latin, which never took root in the language, like children making a mock garden with flowers and branches stuck in the ground, which speedily wither.-Campbell's Essay on English Poetry.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES.