, but
true instincts of the natural English ear, every one was at sea. Yet it
seemed as if every one was trying his hand at verse. Popular writing
took that shape. The curious and unique record of literature preserved
in the registers of the Stationers' Company, shows that the greater
proportion of what was published, or at least entered for publication,
was in the shape of ballads. The ballad vied with the sermon in doing
what the modern newspaper does, in satisfying the public craving for
information, amusement, or guidance. It related the last great novelty,
the last great battle or crime, a storm or monstrous birth. It told some
pathetic or burlesque story, or it moralized on the humours or follies
of classes and professions, of young and old, of men and of women. It
sang the lover's hopes or sorrows, or the adventures of some hero of
history or romance. It might be a fable, a satire, a libel, a squib, a
sacred song or paraphrase, a homily. But about all that it treated it
sought to throw more or less the colour of imagination. It appealed to
the reader's feelings, or sympathy, or passion. It attempted to raise
its subject above the level of mere matter of fact. It sought for choice
and expressive words; it called in the help of measure and rhythm. It
aimed at a rude form of art. Presently the critical faculty came into
play. Scholars, acquainted with classical models and classical rules,
began to exercise their judgment on their own poetry, to construct
theories, to review the performances before them, to suggest plans for
the improvement of the poetic art. Their essays are curious, as the
beginnings of that great critical literature, which in England, in spite
of much infelicity, has only been second to the poetry which it judged.
But in themselves they are crude, meagre, and helpless; interesting
mainly, as showing how much craving there was for poetry, and how little
good poetry to satisfy it, and what inconceivable doggrel could be
recommended by reasonable men, as fit to be admired and imitated. There
is fire and eloquence in Philip Sidney's _Apologie for Poetrie_ (1581);
but his ideas about poetry were floating, loose, and ill defined, and he
had not much to point to as of first-rate excellence in recent writers.
Webbe's _Discourse of English Poetrie_ (1586), and the more elaborate
work ascribed to George Puttenham (1589), works of tame and artificial
learning without Sidney's fire, reveal equally the poverty,