REVIEWS

PICTURES OF ELIZABETH AND HER TIME

THE QUEEN'S PROGRESS AND OTHER ELIZABETHAN SKETCHES. By Felix E. Schelling. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Company.

1904.

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"The following sketches- -for they claim to be no more some of the lighter matters that have floated on a stream of reading and study which has already carried, let it be hoped, a somewhat weightier freight. It is one thing to taste the charm and flavor of an age; it is another to convey it. The days of Elizabeth and James were nothing if not multiform. Their trivialities even have their place, and their power to complete the picture whether historical or literary: a power not always apprehended in view of the number and variety of the important figures that crowd the spacious canvas of that incomparable time."

These are the author's own introductory words. After reading these delightful little essays through, one might have some hesitancy in calling them sketches; but that they are in truthdelicate miniatures done in water, rich in the glowing color and mellow with the time-softened atmosphere of that glorious age in which Shakespeare breathed and sang. Even when one realizes that there is no pretension to profundity, to discovery, or to invention, and that only freshness and direct simple portrayal of some of the less familiar subjects of that good age are to be expected from this volume, one who really loves the history and literature of the Elizabethan times must be on his guard lest he allow himself to be led into too extravagant words of praise as he contemplates and enjoys the pictures here presented.

Not only has the author of these sketches felt the charm and known the flavor of the age, but he has succeeded admirably in conveying it. He has not exploited himself, his individual tastes, his personal opinions and his private theories, but has given us a series of purely objective studies, veiling himself behind the scenes which he depicts. Not once in the book does the pronoun of the first person appear; and yet one is aware of the

presence and guidance of a delightful and gifted personality and a mind delicately sensitive to the slightest manifestations of the poetic spirit which was so widely disseminated in the age of which he treats. Professor Schelling possesses a rare gift of discrimination and a sure taste in selection, so that he moves about in the luxuriant growths of these Elizabethan fields and with unerring precision picks the flowers of poetic beauty and lays his hand on the fruit of fact or historic detail.

One feels, after reading the essay which gives the volume its title, that he knows in a more personal and intimate way the haughty Queen. Elizabeth the monarch has become Elizabeth the woman-with all a woman's love for social success and polite compliment, not to say gross flattery. The picture is not altogether to the Queen's advantage. Her unreasonable temper, her vanity, her mendacity, her mastery of deceit and subterfuge, her meanness in money matters, her scheming visits whereby she might live at the expense of the favorites on whom she put herself and her retinue all this makes no lovely picture. But there was something of the eternal womanly about the brilliant. and accomplished Queen which attracted and held the high and choice spirits of the age as her most faithful supporters.

An Elizabethan will forms the nucleus of the second sketch and affords a suggestion for an excursion into the domestic life of the times; and this leads naturally to a consideration of the type represented in the gentleman fortune-seeker who marries the rich widow and spends the fortune, and of the moneymaking merchant who amassed it in the first instance. In the former no less a person than the poet and prose writer and gallant soldier George Gascoigne is depicted.

We hear of the marvelous vicissitudes of Thomas Stucley, gentleman-adventurer, in the next sketch. This widely-known personage has not heretofore received the attention that is his due, considering the power he exercised at the various courts of Europe during his wonderfully interesting career. "An OldTime Friendship" introduces us into the charming company of Fulke Greville, known as Lord Brooke, and Sir Philip Sidney, the knight sans peur et sans reproche. The appropriate title of the essay treating of the children who took such prominent part

in many of the plays, the most difficult ones too, of the age, is quoted from a well-known passage in Hamlet—“An aery of children, little eyases." It is a delightful study. The pathetic story of Robert Greene's checkered career is the theme of the sketch bearing the title of the well-known pamphlet, "A Groatsworth of Wit," in which Shakespeare was attacked as "an upstart crow," this being the first reference to the poet in contemporary literature.

"Plays in the Making" presents the practical side of the playwright's life and labors. In two typical examples we have a striking contrast. On the one hand, the struggles of the literary hack, always in debt to a hard taskmaster, often in want and frequently in prison for lack of funds, as in the pathetic case of the sweet-souled Thomas Dekker, who spent his life in bondage to Phillip Henslowe, the hard, astute, yet illiterate theatrical manager whose so-called " Diary" is the source of so much of our information in regard to plays, players, play-houses and play-makers; and on the other hand, the successful career of an actor play-wright and part owner in the most noted company of the day, one who amassed a fortune which enabled him to return after a few years to the retirement and peace of no less renowned a place than Stratford-on-Avon, his birthplace and early home.

The chapter devoted to the musical collections of the age and the lyrics set to music is charmingly introduced with Richard Barnfield's noble sonnet "When music and sweet poetry agree." Like Lanier, in whose lectures recently published under the title "Shakespeare and his Forerunners," a section is given up to this very topic, Professor Schelling is by temperament and training eminently fitted to write on the union of music and poetry. After treating the various forms of musical expression popular in that day we are regaled with brief sketches of some of the most noted singers and musicians of the time. Among them Thomas Campion is taken as an example of one in whose work we have the sister arts of poetry and sweet music "fittingly and indissolubly wedded." I cannot refrain from giving at least one paragraph of Professor Schelling's happy vein of criticism.

"The poetry of Campion is saturated with Catullus and it shares in the Roman poet's sweetness, sensuousness and melli

fluous flow of musical words. Campion is not wholly a poet of love, although he lavishes on Venus's altars his richest and loveliest fruits. There is a purity and simple childlike fervor, a genuine singing quality and happy mastery of phrase in the more serious of his songs that raise Campion measurably above the chorus of amourists and dainty gilded sonneteers who rise and fall in a singing swarm among the sallows of the Elizabethan garden of Love."

The final chapters are devoted to "Thalia in Oxford," and "A Journey to the North." The walking tours of Ben Jonson and John Taylor, the water-poet, through Scotland are paralleled in the last of these sketches.

A final word must be said of the typographical excellence of the volume. With the half-dozen beautiful etchings, the quaint old head-piece decorations, and the excellent type and broad margins, and the suggestive catchwords at the bottom of each page after the Elizabethan fashion, we have a book that is in itself a thing of beauty. Let us be thankful that the time has come when American publishers find it to their profit to put out such attractive specimens of book-making.

Philadelphia, Pa.

L. W. PAYNE.

APROPOS THE TERCENTENARY OF CERVANTES

LIFE OF CERVANTES. By Albert F. Calvert. London and New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head. 1905.

On picking up this "Life of Cervantes," one is immediately impressed with the boldness displayed on the title page, where this meagre booklet is referred to, in large red type, as "The Tercentenary Edition." But this matter of taste might be pardoned, if the book were of such a character that one might reasonably hope, with the author, that it might find "an unoccupied niche in the broad gallery of Cervantist literature." In a mere essay of less than a hundred pages, however, the author has given us a life of Cervantes that is in no respect so readable a book as the scholarly life of the immortal author of Don Quijote by Fitzmaurice-Kelly, to whose conclusions on debatable

questions greater heed should have been given; and, in the occasional statements that betray a lack of acquaintance with the larger field of Spanish literature and the influence of those who have made it on the foreign literatures, he calls into question the value of those concerning Cervantes. In his desire to exalt Cervantes, he has done it by ignoring Calderon and belittling Lope, which no student of Spanish literature can pardon; and this, too, when Fitzmaurice-Kelly, whose "wholesome sanity" he has praised, has tried to guard all Cervantistas from an attack of lues boswelliana. Moreover, the little book is not free from typographical errors and inconsistencies.

As an essay of appreciation the book may be read with interest and even profit. It has movement and sequence and flashes of sustained narrative and clever condensation of particular episodes in Cervantes life, e. g., that of his captivity at Algiers.

The notable feature of the book, a really delightful addition, is the frequent use of illustrations from the various editions of Don Quijote and title pages of early editions of Cervantes' works. We regret in this connection that one was not included from the Stuttgart edition of 1837 with illustrations by Johannot. The "Repertoire of Documents" is of interest. In a book of this scope and character however, there is no place for such an extended Bibliography.

The University of the South.

GLEN LEVIN SWIGGETT.

GREAT ENGLISHMEN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

GREAT ENGLISHMEN OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. By Sidney Lee. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1904.

In the spring of 1903, Sidney Lee, a collaborator with Leslie Stephen and later sole editor of the monumental "Dictionary of National Biography," delivered a course of eight lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston. Those lectures are now in substance